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Statistics · Updated 20 October 2026

AI search statistics

20 numbers on AI search that you can quote, each with its source and date. We open every source before adding a number, and we don't round in ways that change the meaning. Where a figure is from our own research, it's marked.

AI answers and clicks

  1. AI Overviews cut the click-through rate of the top-ranking page by 58%

    Average desktop CTR for position one, December 2025 compared with December 2023, across 300,000 keywords.

    Source: Ahrefs · February 2026

  2. People clicked a normal search result on 8% of Google visits with an AI summary, against 15% without one

    Browsing data from 900 US adults, March 2025, covering 68,879 searches.

    Source: Pew Research Center · July 2025

  3. Only 1% of visits to a Google page with an AI summary included a click on a link inside the summary

    Same Pew Research Center study.

    Source: Pew Research Center · July 2025

  4. 26% of Google searches with an AI summary ended the browsing session, against 16% without one

    Same Pew Research Center study.

    Source: Pew Research Center · July 2025

  5. An earlier study put the drop in clicks to the top result at 34.5%

    Ahrefs' first study, before the update above.

    Source: Ahrefs · April 2025

Where AI answers get their information

  1. Wikipedia made up 47.9% of ChatGPT's top-10 cited sources

    Profound's analysis of about 30 million citations, August 2024 to June 2025. Reddit was second at 11.3%.

    Source: Profound, via Search Engine Roundtable · June 2025

  2. Reddit made up 46.7% of Perplexity's top-10 cited sources

    Same Profound analysis.

    Source: Profound, via Search Engine Roundtable · June 2025

  3. Reddit was the top source for Google AI Overviews at 21%, ahead of YouTube and Quora

    Same Profound analysis. Wikipedia was 5.7%.

    Source: Profound, via Search Engine Roundtable · June 2025

  4. Branded web mentions correlate with AI Overview visibility at 0.664; backlinks at 0.218

    Spearman correlations across 75,000 brands. Branded anchors 0.527, branded search volume 0.392, Domain Rating 0.326. Correlation, not proof.

    Source: Ahrefs · May 2025

  5. Adding quotations raised a page's visibility in AI answers by about 41%; statistics by about 31%; citing sources by about 27%

    Controlled test of rewriting methods in the GEO paper. Keyword stuffing lowered visibility by about 8%. Figures are relative changes on the paper's main measure.

    Source: Aggarwal et al., GEO: Generative Engine Optimization · 2023, revised June 2024

How ready websites are

  1. 11.0% of the world's top 1,000 websites block at least one AI search crawler; 17.6% of the top 100 do

    OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot or Claude-SearchBot, read from robots.txt. India's top 1,000: 3.7%.

    Source: Vectura Digital study · October 2026 · Our research

  2. 60.9% of top sites that block AI training crawlers also block AI search crawlers

    World top 1,000. In India's top 1,000 it's 48.3%.

    Source: Vectura Digital study · October 2026 · Our research

  3. 9.9% of the world's top 1,000 websites have a valid llms.txt file; 5.5% of India's top 1,000

    99 and 55 sites respectively.

    Source: Vectura Digital study · October 2026 · Our research

  4. 48.0% of India's top 1,000 websites have no crawler rules at all, against 30.5% worldwide

    No robots.txt file, or a web page in its place.

    Source: Vectura Digital study · October 2026 · Our research

What Google has said and changed

  1. Search Console's Generative AI performance report reached all websites worldwide on 31 August 2026

    It shows impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode by page, country, date and device. It doesn't show clicks.

    Source: Google, via Search Engine Journal · August 2026

  2. Google stopped showing FAQ rich results on 7 May 2026

    FAQ markup can stay on pages, but it no longer produces the expandable result.

    Source: Google Search Central · May 2026

  3. Google says no special files or markup are needed to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode

    A page must be indexed and eligible for a normal snippet.

    Source: Google Search Central · Checked October 2026

  4. Google ran two core updates and four spam updates in 2026 so far

    Core: 27 March and 21 May. Spam: 24 March, 24 June, 18 August, 24 September.

    Source: Google Search Status Dashboard · Checked October 2026

What it costs

  1. $501 to $1,000 a month is the most common SEO retainer, charged by 20.4% of providers surveyed

    Poll of 439 SEO providers. The most common hourly rate was $75 to $100 (24%).

    Source: Ahrefs · Updated August 2024

  2. ₹8,000 to ₹20,000 a month is the published range for SEO for a single-location business in India

    Agency market estimate.

    Source: upGrowth · 2026

State of AI search, once a month

The month's changes from Google and the AI companies, new numbers worth knowing, and one thing to fix on your site. One short email.

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Using these numbers

Quote the original source for each figure. If this page helped you find it, a link back is appreciated:

AI search statistics, Vectura Digital (updated 20 October 2026): https://www.vecturadigital.com/ai-search-statistics

Found a newer figure or a mistake? Email info@vecturadigital.com. Compiled by Praveen Kumar.