Are these Cituna’s own numbers?

No. This page is a curated roundup of third-party research. Pew Research, Ahrefs, Semrush, Conductor, Similarweb, OpenAI and the Princeton GEO paper. Every figure links to its primary source so you can verify it. We aggregate and date the data; we do not claim to have measured it ourselves.

What is the single most important stat here?

For most marketers it is the click collapse: Pew found people clicked a traditional result on just 8% of searches that showed an AI summary, versus 15% without one, and Ahrefs measured a 58% lower click-through rate for the #1 organic result when an AI Overview appears. Visibility inside the AI answer, not just the blue links, is now where attention is decided.

How often is this page updated?

We refresh it as significant new studies are published and re-check the linked figures. The “last updated” date in the header reflects the most recent review. AI-search numbers move fast, so treat anything more than a few months old as directional and click through to the source for the current figure.

Does this mean SEO is dead?

No, it means the surface changed. The same crawlable, authoritative, well-structured content that ranks also gets cited by AI engines, and Google still handles the large majority of searches. What changes is that ranking a link is no longer the finish line; being the source the answer quotes is. That is what answer engine optimization (AEO) and generative engine optimization (GEO) address.

AI Search & Citation Statistics (2026)

This is a sourced snapshot of where AI search stands in 2026, how many people use it, how it changes clicks, which sources get cited, and what actually influences those citations. These are third-party figures, not our own measurements; every number links to its primary source. Where a figure is a forecast or an estimate, we say so.

The audience has already moved

AI answer engines are no longer early-adopter tools. In October 2025 OpenAI said ChatGPT had reached 800 million weekly active users , roughly one in ten adults on earth. Pew Research separately found that 34% of U.S. adults have used ChatGPT, about double the share in 2023.

The pattern holds across engines. Google reported its AI Overviews reached 2 billion monthly users by mid-2025, up from 1.5 billion two months earlier, and Perplexity’s CEO said the engine handled 780 million queries in a single month, growing more than 20% month over month.

AI answers are becoming the default surface

It is not just that people use AI tools directly, AI answers are moving into the search results themselves. Pew found that about 18% of Google searches produced an AI summary, rising to 53% for queries of ten or more words and 60% for questions. Semrush’s larger study tracked AI Overviews appearing on 6.5% of queries in January 2025, peaking near 24.6% in July before settling at 15.7% by November , volatile, but structurally higher than a year earlier.

On the Gartner forecast Gartner’s widely-quoted 2024 prediction that traditional search volume would fall 25% by 2026 is often cited as fact. Treat it as a forecast: Google still holds roughly 90% of search, and the sharpest 2026 analyses argue the drop has not materialized. The shift is real; the specific number is contested.

The click collapse

This is the finding that matters most for marketers. When an AI summary appears, people click far less. Pew measured a traditional-result click on just 8% of pages with an AI summary, versus 15% without, and only 1% of those visits produced a click on one of the summary’s own cited sources. Ahrefs, analyzing 300,000 keywords, found an AI Overview correlates with a 58% lower click-through rate for the #1 organic result.

Click behavior with and without an AI summary
Behavior	With an AI summary	Without
Clicked a traditional result	8%	15%
Clicked a source cited in the summary	1%	—
Ended the browsing session	26%	16%

Source: Pew Research Center, browsing tracked March 2025. The AI answer increasingly ends the journey rather than starting a click.

Who gets cited

If clicks now depend on being inside the answer, the question becomes: who do the engines cite? Pew found 88% of AI summaries cited three or more sources, with a median length of 67 words. And the citations concentrate: across ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and Perplexity, Semrush’s analysis of more than 100 million citations found the five most-cited domains were Reddit, Wikipedia, LinkedIn, YouTube and Forbes. Perplexity’s citations also overlap strongly with Google’s top organic results, a reminder that classic SEO authority still feeds the answer.

The five most-cited domains across AI engines
Rank	Most-cited domain
1	Reddit
2	Wikipedia
3	LinkedIn
4	YouTube
5	Forbes

Source: Semrush, 230,000+ prompts and 100M+ citations across ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and Perplexity (Jul–Oct 2025).

What actually moves AI citations

The encouraging part: citations are influenceable. The foundational study is Princeton’s “GEO: Generative Engine Optimization” paper, which found that optimizing content can lift a source’s visibility in generative-engine answers by up to 40%. In the same paper, the highest-impact tactics were adding relevant statistics and authoritative quotations to content, exactly the kind of extractable, evidence-backed writing AI engines prefer to cite. Structured, answer-first content that a machine can lift cleanly beats keyword density.

The budget is following the behavior

Marketing teams are reallocating. Conductor’s survey of 250+ senior leaders found 94% plan to increase AEO investment in 2026, that enterprises already put an average of 12% of digital budget toward AEO in 2025, and that 97% said it positively affected the funnel. The traffic is moving too: Similarweb estimated AI referral traffic to the top 1,000 sites hit about 1.13 billion visits in June 2025, up 357% year over year, with ChatGPT driving the large majority, and ChatGPT referrals to 250 news and media sites nearly doubled in the first four months of 2025. (Referral-traffic figures are modeled estimates, not logged truth.)

How to read this page Every figure above links to its primary source, with the study size and date noted where it matters. Numbers from surveys and traffic panels are estimates and move quickly, click through for the current figure before quoting it. If you spot one that has gone stale, tell us and we will fix it.

The through-line is simple: your buyers are asking AI engines the questions they used to type into Google, the answer increasingly ends the journey, and a small set of well-structured, well-cited sources win the mention. Measuring whether you are one of them, across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Grok and Google AI Overviews, is exactly what Cituna does.