Every statistic here names its source and the date it was measured. Company user counts are the companies' own claims, and the row says so.
Stale figures are replaced, not stacked. Each replacement is logged at the bottom of the page.
Users, referrals and prevalence are three different things. A user count says how many people open an assistant.
Referral share says how much traffic it sends out. Prevalence says how often an AI answer appears on a results page.
How many people use each AI assistant
Company disclosures, with the measure each company chose. Weekly and monthly actives are not comparable.
| Product | Figure | What it counts | Source and date |
|---|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | 1 billion+ | Weekly active users. The series ran 200M (Aug 2024), 700M (Aug 2025), 900M (Feb 2026) with 50M paying subscribers | OpenAI, 31st Jul 2026; our entry |
| Google AI Overviews | 2.5 billion+ | Monthly users. The series ran 1B (Oct 2024), 1.5B (May 2025), 2B+ (Jul 2025) | Sundar Pichai, I/O 2026 keynote, May 2026 |
| Google AI Mode | 1 billion+ | Monthly active users, announced at I/O 2026 | Our AI Mode tracker, from Google's I/O 2026 keynote |
| Gemini app | 1 billion+ | Monthly active users. The series ran 400M+ (May 2025), 650M+ (Oct 2025), 750M+ (Feb 2026), 900M+ (May 2026), 950M (Jul 2026) | Google, 11th Aug 2026; the full series |
| Gemini (court record) | 350 million | Monthly active users in March 2025, from Google's internal data shown in the US antitrust case | Revealed 23rd Apr 2025; our Gemini statistics |
| Grok | 117 million | Monthly active users, SEC-audited, twelve months to 31st Mar 2026 | SpaceX IPO filing, via Forbes, 21st May 2026; our Grok statistics |
| Perplexity | 780 million | Queries in May 2025, the last usage figure Perplexity disclosed. Not a user count | Our Perplexity tracker |
Anthropic has published no Claude user count, and Microsoft publishes no Copilot consumer user count. Both rows are absent on purpose.
Which assistant sends the most traffic to websites
Statcounter's share of the AI referral pool. A share, not a volume, so one assistant rising can mean another falling.
| Assistant | Share of AI referrals, Mar 2026 | Source |
|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | 78.16% (76.85% in Apr 2026, a series low) | Statcounter, Apr 2026, 3 billion+ page views a month across 1 million+ sites; our entry |
| Gemini | 8.65% (9% in Apr 2026) | |
| Perplexity | 7.07% | |
| Microsoft Copilot | 3.19% | |
| Claude | 2.91% |
Grok is absent from Statcounter's series because, per Statcounter, "it does not provide referral data in its header".
| Statistic | Value | Source and date |
|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT answers that cite the web | 6.8% in May 2026, from 1.3% a year earlier | Similarweb, via our ChatGPT tracker |
| ChatGPT referrals that land on a homepage | 58.8% | Similarweb 2026 Generative AI Landscape report, via our ChatGPT tracker |
| Claude referral growth, Jan to Apr 2026 | +386% | SE Ranking, panel of 101,574 sites; our Claude tracker |
| Bing worldwide search share | 4.5% | Statcounter, Aug 2026 |
How often AI Overviews appear
The answer depends on the query set. Commercial keyword panels run high; real-user samples run lower.
| Query set | Share showing an AI Overview | Source and date |
|---|---|---|
| Broad keyword panel (10M+ keywords) | 15.69% (Nov 2025), down from a 24.61% peak (Jul 2025); 6.49% in Jan 2025 | Semrush, Dec 2025 |
| Enterprise panel (21.9M queries, 13,770 domains) | 25.11% | Conductor, Nov 2025 |
| Commercial verticals, nine industries | About 48%, +58% year over year; healthcare 88% | BrightEdge via Search Engine Journal, Mar 2026 |
| Real user searches, March 2025 | About 18%, about 1 in 5 | Pew Research Center, Jul 2025 |
| US clickstream panel | 43%, up from 15% a year earlier | Similarweb via TechCrunch, Jul 2026, no methodology published |
| Representative real-user queries (ORCAS set), mobile | 51.5% | Grossman et al., SIGIR 2026, 14,212 queries collected 7 to 8 Dec 2025 |
| Trending queries (55,393 Google Trends queries, 51% sport) | 13.7%; 64.7% for question-form queries | Xu, Iqbal and Montgomery, May 2026, preprint |
| German keywords (100M+) | Just over 20% | SISTRIX, Feb 2026 |
| US trending news queries | 3.47% (health news 17.32%) | NewzDash, Jun 2025 |
Every measurement, with its design and caveats, is on the AI Overviews tracker.
What AI answers do to clicks
Panels, vendor keyword sets and two randomized experiments. The experiments are the causal evidence.
| Statistic | Value | Source and date |
|---|---|---|
| Visits ending in a result click, with and without an AI summary | 8% with, 15% without; 1% click a link inside the summary | Pew Research Center, Jul 2025 |
| Top-result CTR when an AI Overview is present | -58% (Dec 2025 data), from -34.5% (Mar 2025 data) | Ahrefs, Feb 2026 |
| Organic clicks when an overview is shown, randomized experiment | -39.8% | Agarwal and Sen via Search Engine Journal, Jul 2026, 68,089 searches |
| Click-through rate when AI Overviews are hidden, randomized experiment | +8.8 percentage points | Wang, Gleason, Bart, Wilson and Metaxa, Aug 2026, 1,100 US users |
| AIO-query organic CTR recovery | 1.3% (Dec 2025) to 2.4% (Feb 2026) | Seer Interactive, Apr 2026 |
| Market-wide organic click loss, Germany | 265 million clicks a month; 6.6% averaged across all keywords | SISTRIX via Search Engine Journal, Feb 2026 |
Who gets cited, and how reliably
Mechanism studies about where AI answers draw from. No vendor scoreboard, by policy.
| Statistic | Value | Source and date |
|---|---|---|
| Same URL cited by both AI Overviews and AI Mode | 13.7% of the time (16.3% across the top three citations) | Ahrefs, Dec 2025, 540,000 query pairs |
| AI Overview sources absent from the same query's first page | 29.8% of cited domains (28.5% at URL level) | Xu, Iqbal and Montgomery, May 2026 |
| AI Overview claims unsupported by their own cited sources | 11.03% of 98,020 claims | Xu, Iqbal and Montgomery, same study |
| Source overlap between an AI Overview and the first page | Jaccard 0.18 at URL level | Grossman et al., SIGIR 2026 |
| Cited domains unchanged across 17 weeks | 53% of prompts; about 11 domains cited per answer | SISTRIX, May 2026, 82,619 prompts, 6 countries |
| Grok-3 citation failure rate | 94% | Tow Center, Mar 2025, via our Grok statistics |
| Claude citation overlap with Brave Search results | 86.7% | Profound, a March 2025 measurement, via our Claude tracker |
We publish how AI answers choose sources. We do not publish vendor "share of voice" scoreboards, for the reasons on our methodology page.
Changelog: replaced and added figures
Every figure swapped for a newer one is recorded here, with both values.
- Page created with 40 statistics across five tables.
Frequently asked questions
How many people use ChatGPT?
More than 1 billion a week, per OpenAI on 31st Jul 2026. That is a weekly active count, not monthly, so it is not comparable with Gemini's monthly figure.
How many people use Gemini?
More than 1 billion monthly active users of the Gemini app, per Google on 11th Aug 2026. A court record put the figure at 350 million in March 2025.
How many people see AI Overviews?
More than 2.5 billion a month, per Sundar Pichai at I/O 2026. AI Mode passed 1 billion monthly active users at the same event.
Which AI assistant sends the most traffic to websites?
ChatGPT, with 78.16% of AI assistant referrals in March 2026 per Statcounter. Gemini was second at 8.65%, ahead of Perplexity at 7.07%.
What share of Google searches show an AI Overview?
Between about 14% and 51%, depending on the query set. Pew measured about 18% of real searches in March 2025.
Commercial keyword panels run higher, and BrightEdge puts nine tracked industries near 48%.
Compiled by Claude from primary sources, checked by Akash Mansukhani before publication. See how we source and correct this page.Keywords Everywhere, "AI search statistics, each with its source", last updated 6th Sep 2026, https://keywordseverywhere.com/news/ai-search-statistics/