AI search statistics: Google still sends 57 visits for every one from AI chatbots

Google sent 57 visits for every one from AI assistants in September 2026

Google sent 301.8 million visits to the 115,254 sites in Ahrefs' traffic benchmark in September 2026, and all AI assistants together sent 5.28 million. ChatGPT alone sent 4.29 million of those. The gap is closing fast. It has more than halved in 15 months, but mostly because Google sends fewer visits, not because the chatbots send many more.

Both of the numbers in the ratio come from the same panel and the same month, so it's fair to compare them. Google's share of these sites' visits fell from 35.11% in June 2025 to 23.96% in September 2026. That's 11.15 points. AI assistants rose from 0.27% to 0.43% over the same months, or 0.16 points. So the clicks that Google stopped sending didn't move to the chatbots. Most of them went to direct visits and to other channels, or they didn't happen at all.

We read the monthly figures from the data on Ahrefs' tracker page, updated 15 October 2026, and did the division ourselves. Ahrefs counts ChatGPT, Meta AI, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity as AI assistants. The ratio swings with the seasons. It went back up to about 101 in April 2026, then fell again.

How many people use AI search?

Google's AI Overviews is the most used AI search product, with over 2.5 billion monthly users as of May 2026. Sundar Pichai gave that figure at I/O 2026 on 19 May. He said AI Mode, the chat tab inside Google Search, had passed 1 billion monthly users within a year. Google's Search post the same day said AI Mode queries were "more than doubling every quarter" since launch.

Don't add these together. AI Overviews show up on top of the normal Google results, so a person who searches on Google is counted whether or not they meant to use AI. OpenAI counts weekly users across its products, and Google counts monthly ones. One person can sit in every row.

In the US, 60% of adults say they read AI summaries in search results, and 42% say they use chatbots to search for information. Pew Research Center asked 5,119 adults from 17 to 23 February 2026 and published the results on 17 June 2026. About half of US adults use AI chatbots at all. 24% use one daily.

People who use AI still use search engines, and they use them as much as they did before. SparkToro looked at millions of US devices in the Datos panel and found 95% still visit a search engine each month, as of mid 2025. Heavy AI use grew from 3% of US desktop devices in January 2023 to 21% in June 2025. Heavy use of search engines rose too, from 84% to 87%, per its August 2025 study.

Is Google losing search market share to AI?

No, not by StatCounter's count. Google had 89.94% of search engine use worldwide in September 2026, against 90.38% a year before, per StatCounter. It hit 91.32% in July 2026. Bing gained the most over the year, from 4.10% to 5.29%.

Google's search business is still growing, and it's growing fast. Google Search & other revenue rose 17% to $63.3 billion in the second quarter of 2026, up from $54.2 billion a year before, per Alphabet's earnings release. On the earnings call on 22 July 2026, Pichai said that "AI Mode is driving an incremental increase in Search queries overall."

Among the chatbots, ChatGPT has the most AI search referrals by far. It sent 80.47% of the clicks that chatbots sent to websites in September 2026, per StatCounter. Gemini sent 10.94%, Perplexity 5.84%, Microsoft Copilot 1.78% and Claude 0.95%. By visits to the chatbots' own sites, ChatGPT's lead is smaller. Similarweb puts its share at about 53% in May 2026, down from about 76% in June 2025. Our AI chatbot market share page sets every yardstick side by side.

What percentage of Google searches are zero click?

68.01% of US Google searches ended without a click in the first four months of 2026, per SparkToro's study of Similarweb's desktop and mobile panel. That's up from 60.45% in 2024, when the data came from Datos. Ten years ago it was about 45%. Rand Fishkin, who wrote the study, warns that each period used a different panel, so the trend line mixes sources.

There's a surprise in the same data. Only 0.34% of US searches went to AI Mode from January to April 2026. So it wasn't AI Mode that caused the jump in zero click searches. The AI Overviews that sit on top of the normal results are a likelier cause.

The country figures come from SparkToro's follow up post of 16 June 2026, using the same Similarweb panel. No country still sends 300 clicks to the open web for every 1,000 searches. Both studies count mobile searches in a browser but not in the Google app, so the real zero click rate is likely higher.

How much do AI Overviews reduce clicks?

AI Overviews cut the click rate of the top Google result by 58% in December 2025, Ahrefs found in a study of 300,000 keywords. Its first run, in March 2025, found a 34.5% drop. Every study below with a stated sample found fewer clicks when an AI Overview shows. Seer Interactive's newest data is the one that shows clicks coming back.

Pew's study is the only one built on real people's browsing. Users clicked a link inside the AI summary itself in just 1% of visits. They ended their browsing on 26% of pages with an AI summary, against 16% of pages without one.

The results lower on the page lose less. Ahrefs found the drop shrinks from 58% at position one to 46.4% at position three and 19.4% at position ten. Seer found that a brand cited inside the AI Overview got 120% more organic clicks per impression than one left out. That was still 38% fewer than on a search with no AI Overview at all.

How often do AI Overviews show? Ahrefs found one on 20.5% of 146 million desktop results in September 2025, and on 57.9% of question searches. In Pew's March 2025 data, 18% of searches had one. Seer's 2026 data puts it at 36% of informational searches and 5% of transactional ones. Shopping searches rarely get one. Ahrefs counted 3.2%.

How much traffic do AI chatbots send to websites?

AI chatbots sent 0.43% of all visits to the 115,254 sites in Ahrefs' panel in September 2026. ChatGPT sent 4.3 million of the 5.3 million AI visits, or 81%. Meta AI was second with 577,100. Gemini, Claude and Perplexity each sent less than 0.03% of visits.

The chatbots now link out to sites more often than they did. Similarweb found that 6.8% of US ChatGPT answers carried a link to a source in May 2026, up from about 1.6% in June 2025, per its 2026 report. Travel prompts got a link about 23% of the time. Professional services got one under 4% of the time.

The AI companies still take far more from the web than they give back to it. In July 2025, Anthropic's crawlers read about 38,000 pages for every visitor that Anthropic sent to a site, Cloudflare found. The figure was 1,091 for OpenAI and 194 for Perplexity. Cloudflare said 80% of AI crawling over the year to July 2025 was for training, with 18% for search. Those are the latest figures Cloudflare has published in a post, so read them as a mid 2025 snapshot.

If you track how AI answers cite your site, it's best to check more than one model. Whizi runs 280+ models in one chat with web search on by default, so you can ask ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini the same question and compare the sources each one cites.

How we compiled these AI search statistics

We opened every figure on this page at its source on 18 and 19 October 2026. Usage and revenue figures come from Google, Alphabet's earnings release and OpenAI. Click and traffic figures come from studies that state their sample: Pew Research Center, Ahrefs, Seer Interactive, SparkToro with Similarweb's panel, Similarweb's own report and Cloudflare. Market shares come from StatCounter's monthly data.

Some numbers are our own sums. The 57 to 1 ratio, the 130 to 1 ratio and the monthly table divide Google visits by the total from the five AI assistants in Ahrefs' data. ChatGPT's 81% of AI visits is 4.29 million out of 5.28 million.

We cut what we couldn't trace or test. That includes claims that 93% of AI search sessions end without a click, survey results from link building agencies, and a "5 trillion searches a year" figure we couldn't open at Google. We also cut crawl ratios for 2026 that only third party blogs report.

How should you cite these AI search statistics?

You're free to use any figure or table here with a link back to this page. Please credit the original source for numbers that came from someone else. A credit line like this one works:

Source: Whizi Research, "AI search statistics: Google still sends 57 visits for every one from AI chatbots", whizi.io/resources/ai-search-statistics, updated October 2026.