Guide 17 · Evidence
AI search statistics (2026): GEO stats checked against the source
Most GEO and AI search statistics pages repeat the same numbers without opening the study behind them. We opened the primary source for 20 of the most quoted AI search and GEO figures. Eleven hold up as quoted, four are misquoted, three have been replaced by newer data, and two we could not verify. Each row below says what the source actually measured, on what sample, and in which month.
Last verified 20 October 2026. We do not name the pages that misquote a figure. We only link the primary source.
Which GEO statistics hold up as quoted?
| Claim | Source | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| GEO methods can lift visibility by up to 40% | Aggarwal et al., KDD 2024 | Best method was Quotation Addition at +41% on position-adjusted word count. The test used GPT-3.5 over the top five Google results, not live ChatGPT or AI Overviews. |
| On Perplexity, Statistics Addition lifted subjective impression by up to 37% | Same paper, Table 7 | 200 test queries with sources uploaded as files, so it is not Perplexity’s own retrieval. The same table shows +21% for Quotation Addition on position-adjusted word count (the paper text says 22%). |
| Users click a normal result on 8% of visits with an AI summary, against 15% without | Pew Research Center, 22 July 2025 | 900 US adults and 68,879 searches, March 2025. Google disputes the method. |
| Only 1% of visits click a link inside the AI summary | Pew Research Center, 22 July 2025 | Same sample. |
| 18% of Google searches showed an AI summary | Pew Research Center, 22 July 2025 | Same sample. Other studies report 16% to 60%, depending on the keyword set. |
| AI Overviews cut position-1 click-through rate by 58% | Ahrefs, 4 February 2026 | 300,000 keywords, desktop only, December 2025 against December 2023. December 2025 was the low point in the Seer series below, so this may be a trough. |
| Organic click-through rate with an AI Overview rose from 1.31% to 2.36% | Seer Interactive, April 2026 | 53 brands and 5.47 million queries, December 2025 to February 2026. |
| Brands cited in an AI Overview get 120% more organic clicks per impression | Seer Interactive, April 2026 | Informational queries only. Some pages quote it for all queries. |
| Only 38% of AI Overview citations come from top-10 pages, down from about 76% | Ahrefs, 2 March 2026 | 863,000 keyword results and about 4 million cited URLs. |
| Branded web mentions correlate at 0.664 with AI Overview visibility, backlinks at 0.218 | Ahrefs, 26 May 2025 | 75,000 brands analyzed, about a quarter with no AI Overview mentions. A correlation, not proof of cause. |
| 49% of US adults say they ever use AI chatbots, up from 33% in 2024 | Pew Research Center, survey of 17 to 23 February 2026 | The 2024 question was asked only of people who had heard at least a little about chatbots, so the two years may not be strictly comparable. 5,119 US adults on Pew’s American Trends Panel, in the Americans and AI 2026 report published 17 June 2026. |
Which common versions are misquoted?
| Common version | What the source says |
|---|---|
| Adding statistics lifts AI citations by 30% to 40% | In the Aggarwal et al., KDD 2024 paper, Statistics Addition scored +31% on position-adjusted word count and +23% on subjective impression. The 40% and above belongs to Quotation Addition. |
| Statistics addition gives +41% | The +41% is Quotation Addition. The number is real but the method attached to it is wrong. |
| Citing sources lifts visibility by 30% to 115%, credited to Georgia Tech | The 115.1% is Cite Sources for sites ranked fifth, when all sources were optimized at once. The same method cut rank-1 sites by 30.3%. The authors are at IIT Delhi and Princeton, and independent. None is listed at Georgia Tech. |
| 93% of AI search sessions end without a website visit | Semrush measured Google AI Mode only: 92% to 94% zero-click, US desktop clickstream, 1 May to 5 July 2025. It is not a figure for AI search in general. |
Which statistics have been replaced by newer data?
| Old figure | Newer figure |
|---|---|
| AI Overviews cut position-1 click-through rate by 34.5% (Ahrefs, April 2025) | Ahrefs re-ran it and now reports 58% on a two-year gap. See the table above. |
| Cited brands get 35% more organic and 91% more paid clicks (Seer, 2025) | Seer’s April 2026 update replaces it with +120% organic. Pages still quoting the old pair are out of date. |
| ChatGPT has 900 million weekly active users (TechCrunch, 27 February 2026) | 1.2 billion weekly users, in OpenAI’s DevDay 2026 recap (29 September 2026). Verified on OpenAI’s own page on 21 October 2026. OpenAI’s wording is “our collective 1.2B weekly users”, with no split by product or between free and paid users. |
Why do AI Overview prevalence figures disagree?
Three figures circulate for how often Google shows an AI Overview. They answer different questions, so compare them only like with like.
| Source | Figure | What it measured |
|---|---|---|
| Pew Research Center | 18% of searches | Real Google searches by 900 US adults in March 2025: 12,593 of 68,879 showed an AI summary. |
| Conductor | 25.11% of searches | 5.5 million of about 21.9 million US searches in Conductor’s search index, 15 September to 12 October 2025. |
| 48%, attributed to Conductor on a secondary page | Not verified | Conductor’s own page shows 25.11% for that 21.9 million search sample. We could not find 48% there, so we do not use it. |
Which ones could we not verify?
| Claim | Status |
|---|---|
| Zero-click searches grew from 56% to 69% between May 2024 and May 2025 | Reported by Search Engine Roundtable from Similarweb. The Similarweb report it links to covers US publishers, and the page we could open does not show the figure. We cannot say which searches it covers, so we do not use it. |
| 72% of commercial searches generate AI answers, and mature GEO gives 3.7 times the visibility | No primary source and no published data. Do not cite. |
What do our own measurements show?
These are small samples from our own tests, not industry statistics. Each links to the full run.
| Measurement | Result | Run |
|---|---|---|
| What ChatGPT retrieves against what it shows | Retrieved 217 source URLs across 10 answers and displayed 36 (17%). | Run 05, September 2026 |
| The same check on 24 prompts | ChatGPT read 385 sources and showed 47 (12%). | Run 06, October 2026 |
| Repeating a query on Perplexity | Identical query: 100% median source overlap. One added character: 79%. Perplexity against Google AI Mode: 12%. | Run 04, September 2026 |
| Whether this site gets cited | softrecs.com was cited or named in 0 of 72 answers (24 prompts on 3 engines). | Run 06, October 2026 |
What do these numbers mean for a plugin or SaaS founder?
Three habits cover most of it. Quote the method with the number, because the same paper gives +41% for one method and +31% for another. Quote the engine, because a result on Google AI Mode does not carry over to ChatGPT. Quote the month, because the Ahrefs click-through figure moved from 34.5% to 58% in under a year.
Our own measurements follow the same rule. We report the sample and the date next to every figure: Run 05 on what ChatGPT retrieves against what it shows, Run 04 on repeated queries returning identical sources, and Run 06, where this site was cited in 0 of 72 answers.
If you spot a figure here that no longer matches its source, tell us and we will correct it with the date, the way we corrected Run 03.
How do we check these statistics?
The same six rules apply to every row on this page:
- We open the primary page, not a summary of it.
- Every figure carries its publisher, edition, sample and month.
- Vendor-reported figures are labeled apart from independent ones.
- US-only samples say so.
- If the primary page cannot be opened or does not show the figure, it goes under “could not verify”.
- Corrections carry the date they were made.
Questions people ask
How many people click a link inside Google’s AI summary?
In the Pew study, 1% of visits with an AI summary included a click on a link inside it. People clicked a normal result on 8% of those visits, against 15% when there was no summary. The data is from March 2025 and covers 900 US adults.
Do AI Overviews reduce clicks?
Ahrefs found position-1 click-through rate 58% lower on 300,000 keywords, comparing December 2025 with December 2023, on desktop. Seer Interactive found cited brands got 120% more organic clicks per impression on informational queries. Both can be true, because they measure different things.
Which AI search statistics are most often misquoted?
The four in the misquoted table: the 40% and 41% figures that belong to Quotation Addition, not Statistics Addition; the 115% that applies to sites ranked fifth; and the 93% zero-click figure that covers Google AI Mode only.
How this was made: every figure above was checked against the linked page between 16 and 20 October 2026. Drafted with an AI assistant (Claude) and reviewed by Alauddin Chowdhury. Method and AI use.