AI assistants now reach a large share of the world. ChatGPT has more than 1 billion weekly users (OpenAI, August 2026), the Gemini app more than 1 billion monthly users (Google, August 2026), and Google's AI Overviews more than 2 billion monthly users (Google, July 2025). AI Mode passed 1 billion monthly users in May 2026.
Clicks have not followed at the same pace. AI chatbots sent 0.4% of the referral traffic Statcounter tracked worldwide in September 2026, against 91% from search engines, and studies by Pew and Ahrefs show fewer clicks when an AI summary appears. Trust is split: 46% of people worldwide are willing to trust AI systems (KPMG, 2025).
1B+ChatGPT weekly active users (OpenAI, 31 Aug 2026)
2B+monthly users of Google AI Overviews (Google, Jul 2025)
0.4%of worldwide referral traffic came from AI chatbots, Sep 2026 (Statcounter)
8% vs 15%Google visits with a click on a result, with vs without an AI summary (Pew, 2025)
How we built this list. We opened every source ourselves between 21 and 22 October 2026 and copied the number from the original page, not from another roundup. Company figures are labelled as the company's own claims, forecasts are labelled as forecasts, and surveys run by tool vendors are labelled as vendor studies. Numbers we could not confirm at the source are listed at the end, so you know what we left out and why.
How many people use AI assistants?
| Statistic | Source |
|---|---|
| ChatGPT has more than 1 billion weekly active users. | OpenAI, 31 Aug 2026 (company figure) |
| ChatGPT had more than 900 million weekly active users and over 50 million paying subscribers. | OpenAI, 31 Mar 2026 (company figure) |
| By July 2025, ChatGPT users sent 18 billion messages a week; its 700 million users were about 10% of the world's adults. | NBER working paper, Sep 2025 (authors include OpenAI staff) |
| "Seeking Information" grew from 14% to 24% of consumer ChatGPT messages between July 2024 and July 2025. | NBER working paper, Sep 2025 |
| The Gemini app passed 1 billion monthly users. | Google, 11 Aug 2026 (company figure) |
| More than a billion monthly actives use Meta AI across Meta's apps. | Meta earnings call, 29 Oct 2025 (company figure) |
| Microsoft's family of Copilots passed 150 million monthly active users, across work, coding and consumer products. | Microsoft earnings call, 29 Oct 2025 (company figure) |
| 18.8% of the world's working-age population used generative AI in June 2026; the UAE led at 73.3%, the US was at 33.0%. | Microsoft AI Diffusion Report, Sep 2026 (estimate) |
| About half of US adults (49%) use AI chatbots, up from a third in 2024; 24% use them daily. | Pew Research Center, Jun 2026 (survey Feb 2026) |
| 42% of US adults use chatbots to search for information, the most common use. | Pew Research Center, Jun 2026 |
| US adults who use each chatbot: ChatGPT 44%, Gemini 24%, Copilot 17%, Meta AI 14%, Grok 8%, Claude 6%. | Pew Research Center, Jun 2026 |
| Weekly use of generative AI nearly doubled from 18% to 34% across six countries (Argentina, Denmark, France, Japan, UK, US). | Reuters Institute, Oct 2025 |
| Weekly use of AI for getting information more than doubled, from 11% to 24%, overtaking creating media. | Reuters Institute, Oct 2025 |
| 10% of people use AI chatbots for news each week, up from 7%; 16% of under-35s. | Reuters Institute Digital News Report, Jun 2026 |
How big is AI inside search?
| Statistic | Source |
|---|---|
| AI Overviews have over 2 billion monthly users in more than 200 countries and territories and 40 languages. | Alphabet, 23 Jul 2025 (company figure) |
| AI Overviews drive over 10% more queries globally for the types of queries that show them. | Alphabet, 23 Jul 2025 (company claim) |
| AI Mode passed 1 billion monthly users one year after launch, with queries more than doubling every quarter. | Google, 19 May 2026 (company figure) |
| Queries in AI Mode are three times longer than traditional searches. | Alphabet, 4 Feb 2026 |
| Bing reached 1 billion monthly active users for the first time. | Microsoft earnings call, 29 Apr 2026 |
| Google had 89.94% of search engine referrals worldwide in September 2026; Bing had 5.29%. | Statcounter, Sep 2026 (referral share) |
| Share of AI chatbot referrals worldwide: ChatGPT 80.48%, Gemini 10.91%, Perplexity 5.85%, Copilot 1.79%, Claude 0.95%. | Statcounter, Sep 2026 (referral share) |
| 18% of Google searches by a US panel produced an AI summary in March 2025: 8% of one or two word searches, 53% of searches with 10 or more words. | Pew Research Center, Jul 2025 (900 adults) |
| AI Overviews appeared for 15.69% of keywords in November 2025, after peaking near 25% in July. | Semrush, Dec 2025 (vendor study) |
| The share of AI Overview queries that were informational fell from 91.3% in January 2025 to 57.1% in October, as commercial queries grew. | Semrush, Dec 2025 (vendor study) |
| 60% of US adults say they read AI summaries at the top of search results. | Pew Research Center, Jun 2026 |
| 54% of people across six countries saw an AI-generated answer to a search in the past week. | Reuters Institute, Oct 2025 |
| ChatGPT search usage nearly tripled in a year. | OpenAI, 31 Mar 2026 (company claim, no base given) |
| Generative AI platforms get about 9.5 billion visits a month worldwide, up 70% in a year. | Similarweb, Aug 2026 (estimate) |
| 16% of US consumers use AI chatbots to search for new products or services to buy. | Gartner, Jun 2026 (328 US consumers) |
What happens to clicks and traffic?
| Statistic | Source |
|---|---|
| Google users clicked a regular result on 8% of visits with an AI summary, against 15% without one. | Pew Research Center, Jul 2025 |
| Users clicked a link inside the AI summary on 1% of visits to pages that had one. | Pew Research Center, Jul 2025 |
| Users ended their browsing session on 26% of pages with an AI summary, against 16% of pages without. | Pew Research Center, Jul 2025 |
| An AI Overview correlates with a 58% lower click rate for the top-ranking page (desktop, informational keywords). | Ahrefs, Feb 2026 (vendor study) |
| Organic click rates for informational queries with AI Overviews fell 61%, and paid click rates 65%. | Seer Interactive, Nov 2025 (agency study) |
| Brands cited in an AI Overview got 35% more organic clicks and 91% more paid clicks than brands not cited. | Seer Interactive, Nov 2025 (correlation) |
| On the same keywords, the zero-click rate fell from 33.75% to 31.53% after AI Overviews appeared. | Semrush, Dec 2025 (vendor study) |
| About 80% of consumers rely on zero-click results for at least 40% of their searches. | Bain and Company, Feb 2025 (survey) |
| Zero-click behaviour cuts organic web traffic by an estimated 15% to 25%. | Bain and Company, Feb 2025 (estimate) |
| AI chatbots sent 0.4% of worldwide referral traffic, against 91% from search and 8.61% from social media. | Statcounter, Sep 2026 |
| AI-driven traffic to US retail sites grew 127% year over year in August 2026. | Adobe, 2026 holiday forecast (Adobe Analytics data) |
| The average visitor from AI search is worth 4.4 times an organic search visitor, by conversion rate. | Semrush, Jun 2025 (vendor study) |
| Anthropic's crawlers fetched about 38,000 pages for every visit Claude sent back in July 2025, the widest gap of the major AI companies. | Cloudflare, Aug 2025 (Cloudflare traffic) |
| 80% of AI crawling in the year to mid-2025 was for training, 18% for search and 2% for user actions. | Cloudflare, Aug 2025 |
| Google organic search traffic to over 2,500 news sites fell 33% worldwide between November 2024 and November 2025 (38% in the US). | Reuters Institute, Jun 2026 (Chartbeat data) |
| 33% of people who see AI search answers say they always or often click the source links; 28% rarely or never do. | Reuters Institute, Oct 2025 (self-reported) |
| Google's AI features send billions of clicks to websites every week. | Alphabet, 22 Jul 2026 (company claim) |
Do people trust AI answers?
| Statistic | Source |
|---|---|
| 53% of Americans who have seen AI summaries have at least some trust in them; only 6% trust them a lot. | Pew Research Center, Oct 2025 |
| 45% of US adults who don't use chatbots say a major reason is that they don't trust them to give accurate information. | Pew Research Center, Oct 2026 |
| 50% of people who have seen AI search answers in six countries say they trust them. | Reuters Institute, Oct 2025 |
| Trust in answers from AI chatbots is 20% worldwide, against 37% trust in news overall. | Reuters Institute Digital News Report, Jun 2026 |
| Only 46% of people across 47 countries are willing to trust AI systems. | KPMG and University of Melbourne, 2025 (48,000+ people) |
| 53% of US consumers distrust or lack confidence in the reliability of AI search and summaries. | Gartner, Sep 2025 (377 US consumers) |
| 54% of US shoppers who used AI for a recent purchase had to double-check all of the information it gave them. | Gartner, May 2026 (846 US consumers) |
| 50% of US consumers would rather buy from brands that don't use generative AI in consumer-facing content. | Gartner, Mar 2026 (1,539 US consumers) |
What are businesses doing?
| Statistic | Source |
|---|---|
| In 2024 Gartner predicted traditional search engine volume would drop 25% by 2026 because of AI chatbots. | Gartner, Feb 2024 (forecast, not a measurement) |
| Half of consumers intentionally seek out AI-powered search, and McKinsey projects $750 billion in US revenue will flow through it by 2028. | McKinsey, Oct 2025 (survey and projection) |
| 44% of AI search users call it their main source of buying insight, ahead of traditional search at 31%. | McKinsey, Oct 2025 |
| Only 16% of brands systematically track their AI search performance. | McKinsey, Oct 2025 |
| A brand's own websites are often only 5% to 10% of the sources AI search cites about it. | McKinsey, Oct 2025 |
| Nearly nine in ten organisations use AI regularly in at least one business function. | McKinsey State of AI, Aug 2026 (1,719 respondents) |
| 23.8% of US businesses used AI in a business function in the two weeks before the survey. | US Census Bureau BTOS, Oct 2026 (late Sep survey) |
| 19.95% of EU enterprises with 10 or more staff used AI in 2025. | Eurostat, Dec 2025 |
| ChatGPT Ads reached $1 billion in annualised revenue run rate in under 200 days, and is sold in more than 40 countries. | OpenAI, 31 Aug 2026 (company figure) |
| 10% of English web pages in a July 2026 sample show significant signs of AI authorship. | Pew Research Center, Aug 2026 (detector-based) |
Our own data: what AI says when UAE buyers ask for a recommendation
From our UAE AI visibility study: 500 real buyer questions (10 industries, half in English and half in Arabic) sent on 21 October 2026 to Claude with live web search and to Google's Gemini Flash-Lite answering from memory. The questions and the data are free to download.
| Statistic | Source |
|---|---|
| 92.0% of Claude's live-search answers named at least one business, 4.3 on average; Gemini from memory: 93.9%, 5.4 on average. | Adjoltz, Oct 2026 |
| Claude and Gemini named even one business in common on only 16.4% of the 421 questions where both named someone. | Adjoltz, Oct 2026 |
| Asked the same 19 questions twice, the same Gemini model put the same business first only 4 times. | Adjoltz, Oct 2026 |
| Only 20.3% of the 2,405 business names Gemini gave from memory appeared in live-search answers for the same industry. | Adjoltz, Oct 2026 |
| Claude cited 4,634 sources, 9.3 per answer, from 1,954 websites; 1,283 of those sites were cited once. | Adjoltz, Oct 2026 |
| 38% of cited sources had a "best", "top" or "أفضل" style title; only 5 of 4,634 came from UAE government sites. | Adjoltz, Oct 2026 |
| At least 36% of businesses named in English answers had their own website among that answer's sources. | Adjoltz, Oct 2026 |
| 11.6% of Arabic answers named no business, against 5.2% in English; at least 11 of 250 Arabic answers described Saudi businesses instead of UAE ones. | Adjoltz, Oct 2026 |
Note how this sits next to McKinsey's estimate that a brand's own sites are often 5% to 10% of AI sources: in our UAE data, businesses' own sites and other sites outside the big directories were 79.4% of what Claude cited, and the business's own page was among the sources for at least 36% of the businesses named. Local, specific questions lean on a business's own pages far more than brand questions do.
Numbers we left out, and common mistakes
These figures circulate widely, but we could not confirm them at a primary source on 21 or 22 October 2026, so they are not on this page:
- A count of Google searches per year from a current Google page.
- Apple's 2025 court testimony that Safari searches fell, as a primary court record.
- A daily ChatGPT prompt count from an OpenAI page (the figures we found came from press reports).
- A current official monthly query total for Perplexity, or any official Claude user count.
And four mistakes to avoid when you quote AI search numbers:
- Forecasts are not results. Gartner's 25% drop was a 2024 prediction. In May 2026 Google said Search queries had reached an all-time high the quarter before.
- Click studies measure one result, not your site. Ahrefs' 58% is the desktop click rate of the top result on informational keywords.
- Referral share is not usage share. Statcounter counts clicks that reach websites, not how many people use each assistant.
- Check what is counted. Pew's 1% is visits, not users; Microsoft's 150 million covers every Copilot product, not only the consumer chatbot.
How to cite this page. Credit the original source next to each number and link here: "AI search statistics 2026, Adjoltz, updated 22 October 2026, https://adjoltz.com/ai-search-statistics".
What these numbers mean for a business
Your buyers are already asking AI, and the answer often ends the search. A business that is not named in that answer does not get the click that used to come from ranking third. That is why we measure our clients by the questions they are named for, not by visits alone. Adjoltz works with businesses worldwide (prices in USD at adjoltz.com/us) and in the UAE and GCC (AED): a free AI check, an audit at AED 1,950 or USD 549, and monthly plans from AED 4,500 or USD 1,249 that track your questions on ChatGPT and Gemini (Google AI), month to month, with an unconditional 30-day money-back guarantee (rules).