AI Search Statistics 2026: How LLM-Driven Traffic Is Changing Search

AI search statistics measure how often AI-generated answers appear in search results, how they change click behaviour, and how many people now start their research inside an AI tool rather than a search engine.

This page collects 15 statistics from 7 sources, 8 of them from our own research. Every figure names its source, links the page that published it, and carries the date we last confirmed it. Anything here is free to quote with attribution — there is a suggested citation at the bottom.

Last updated 19 September 2026.

What's on this page

• How often AI Overviews actually appear (6)
• What happens to clicks when AI answers the question (3)
• Adoption: how many people start inside an AI tool (3)
• Referral traffic from AI platforms (2)
• What marketers report seeing (1)

How often AI Overviews actually appear

Presence is not uniform, and averages across the whole web hide the only thing that matters to a given business: whether its own queries are affected. Source: Indexed, AI Overviews by industry, 2026.

• 52.4% of 317 US commercial keywords measured across 11 industries returned an AI Overview between 31 July and 19 September 2026. Source: Indexed, 2026. Last verified 19 September 2026.
• AI Overview presence ranged from 0% in home services to 96.7% in B2B accounting software — a 96.7-point spread across 11 industries. Source: Indexed, 2026. Last verified 19 September 2026.
• None of the 23 keywords containing “near me” or “local” returned an AI Overview, against 56.5% of the other 294 keywords measured. Source: Indexed, 2026. Last verified 19 September 2026.
• Only 19 of 317 keywords (6.0%) showed an AI Overview and a local pack on the same results page. Source: Indexed, 2026. Last verified 19 September 2026.
• 84% of 50 B2B keywords triggered an AI Overview in March 2026, and 16 of the 17 named keywords still did when re-measured in September 2026. Source: Indexed, 2026. Last verified 19 September 2026.
• 164 of the 166 AI Overviews recorded (98.8%) linked out to at least one source. Source: Indexed, 2026. Last verified 19 September 2026.

What happens to clicks when AI answers the question

• B2B keywords showing an AI Overview averaged a 50.6% organic click rate against 60.7% for keywords without one — a gap of roughly 10 percentage points. Source: Indexed, 2026. Last verified 19 September 2026.
• The most exposed B2B category, metrics and definitional terms, averaged a 44% organic click rate; how-to and process queries held at 63%. Source: Indexed, 2026. Last verified 19 September 2026.
• Pages appearing in Google AI Overviews saw an average click-through-rate reduction of roughly 8–10% for informational queries. Source: Semrush, 2024. Last verified 27 March 2026.

Adoption: how many people start inside an AI tool

• ChatGPT reached 100 million users within two months of launch, the fastest consumer application adoption on record at the time. Source: Reuters, 2023. Last verified 27 March 2026.
• Traditional search engine volume is projected to fall by 25% by 2026 as buyers shift to AI chatbots and virtual agents. Source: Gartner, 2024. Last verified 27 March 2026.
• 43% of B2B buyers reported using AI tools as part of their vendor research process. Source: Gartner, 2025. Last verified 27 March 2026.

Referral traffic from AI platforms

This is the worst-measured area in the list. Several AI platforms do not pass referrer data consistently, so published figures vary widely and should be read as directional.

• Perplexity has reported over 15 million monthly active users and approximately 500 million queries per month. Source: Perplexity, 2025. Last verified 27 March 2026.Carried over from the March 2026 version of this page, where it was published without a link to a primary source. We have not been able to re-confirm it against a Perplexity publication; treat it as unverified until we have.
• Referral traffic from AI search tools remains small relative to organic search volume but has been growing through 2025. Source: Similarweb, 2025. Last verified 27 March 2026.The original citation pointed at Similarweb's homepage rather than the report containing the figure. Directional only until we can link the underlying publication.

What marketers report seeing

• 67% of SEO professionals surveyed reported that AI Overviews had negatively affected their organic traffic. Source: Search Engine Land, 2025. Last verified 27 March 2026.

Methodology and sourcing

Figures attributed to Indexed come from our own SERP measurements; each links to the methodology section of the study that produced it, where the sample, date range and limitations are stated in full. Third-party figures link to the page that published them rather than to an article repeating it, wherever we have been able to find it — and where we have not, the statistic says so rather than hiding it.

"Last verified" means a person opened that source and confirmed it still states this figure on that date. It is not the date this page was last edited. Any statistic older than 12 months is flagged for re-checking by a scheduled job. Statistics in this field have a short shelf life, and we would rather show you the date than imply a freshness we cannot support.

How to cite this page

Source: Indexed, "AI Search Statistics 2026: How LLM-Driven Traffic Is Changing Search", 19 September 2026, joinindexed.com/blog/ai-search-statistics-2026

Every statistic has its own anchor, so you can link the figure you are quoting rather than the whole page. If the figure is ours, please cite Indexed; if it belongs to a third party, please cite them — the link beside each statistic goes to the original.

Related reading

• Where AI Overviews actually appear: 11 industries, 317 keywords
• The AI Overview Effect: how Google's AI is reshaping B2B search
• How AI search engines decide what to cite
• How Google AI Overviews work
• The best LLM rank trackers in 2026