SEO Statistics for 2026: 64 Verified Data Points on Search and AI

SEO statistics go stale fast. In the last two years Google added AI Overviews and AI Mode, ChatGPT passed 900 million weekly users, and B2B buyers started shortlisting vendors inside chatbots. A stat from 2023 about click-through rates now describes a search results page that no longer exists.

We rebuilt this list from scratch in October 2026. Every statistic below comes from 2025 or 2026 data, apart from one technical test that has no newer equivalent and carries its year. We opened each original study rather than citing a roundup, and we link the source next to the number with the date of the data. Each stat ends with one sentence on what it means for a SaaS marketing team.

The first section shares findings from Maeva Cifuentes's own research on AI citations. Maeva is Flying Cat's founder. The last section shares statistics from Flying Cat's own client work.

Note from Maeva: I lead strategy on every account, so those are numbers I have watched move in our reports.

AI citation statistics from Flying Cat research

Maeva publishes her own AI search research in her newsletter, The Search Spot. For Product pages with 5+ top-10 rankings are 7x more likely to get cited by AI (October 2026), she studied 488 product-type pages from 99 Forbes Cloud 100 companies. She used Ahrefs citation and ranking data, plus 90 days of Scrunch tracking for 7 B2B software brands, with data from July 10 to October 8, 2026. The findings are correlational. The sample covers large, well-known software brands, so smaller SaaS companies may see different patterns.

• 76% of product pages with five or more top-10 keywords reached 10+ AI citations, against 10% of pages below that threshold. Google rankings are the strongest entry ticket to AI citations for product pages, so classic SEO comes first.
• Pages with no top-10 keywords reached 10+ AI citations 6% of the time, while every page with 100+ top-10 keywords did. Citation odds climb steadily with ranking breadth, so widen the keyword set each product page ranks for.
• Ranking breadth correlated with AI citations at about 0.81. Referring domains correlated at 0.68 on their own, but only 0.26 once rankings were held equal. Links help mainly through the rankings they produce, so judge link building by its ranking impact.
• Pricing pages had a median of 52 AI citations, platform pages 21, and solution and integration pages 1. Assistants answer pricing questions from your own site, so keep the pricing page complete and current.
• The 488 pages earned 29,011 citations. The top 10% of pages held 83% of them. A handful of pages carry nearly all of a brand's AI visibility, so find and protect yours first.
• After controlling for ranking, none of the 14 on-page traits Maeva measured correlated with citations above 0.15. The list included FAQ schema, question-style headings, word count and product schema. Formatting tweaks alone will not earn citations, so treat them as hygiene rather than strategy.
• Descriptive copy correlated with citations at 0.19, while benefit-led copy correlated at -0.18. Among pages with 20+ top-10 keywords, descriptive pages had a median of 101.5 citations against 34 for benefit-led pages. Assistants quote pages that say plainly what the product does, so lead product copy with features and specifics.
• Pages that earned more citations than their rankings predicted carried a signup or free-trial CTA 59% of the time, against 18% for under-performers. Examples or templates appeared on 24% of over-performers and 3% of under-performers. Concrete, self-serve product pages attract more citations, so show examples and a clear next step.
• In one brand's 157-prompt test, its product page citation rate stayed between 8% and 11% whether listicles appeared in 44% or 70% of responses. Listicles and product pages earn citations side by side, so you need both.

For What 93,968 AI answers said about self-promotional listicles (October 2026), Maeva pulled Scrunch data for five B2B SaaS clients and their competitors. The set covers 1,854 tracked prompts, 93,968 AI answers from Q2 and Q3 2026 and 421,687 citations classified by page type. The prompts lean toward "best X" and "X alternatives" questions, which favors listicles. The results show association, since an assistant that already planned to name a vendor may also cite that vendor's page.

• Listicles earned 60.9% of AI citations in Q3 2026, down from 62.1% in Q2. Review sites and directories grew from 5.8% to 7.4%. Listicles remain the page type assistants cite most for category questions, so keep yours current.
• When an AI answer cited a vendor's own listicle, it named that vendor 45.4% of the time. On the same questions without that listicle cited, the vendor was named 16.3% of the time. A cited self-promotional listicle nearly triples the odds of getting named, even though the name goes missing in over half of those answers.
• 78 of 94 vendors were named more often when their own listicle was cited. Fourteen saw no change and two were named less often. The data shows no sign of harm from publishing self-promotional listicles.
• Nearly unknown vendors went from a 0.9% naming rate to 21.5% when their listicle was cited. Dominant brands moved from 74.8% to 80.0%. Smaller brands gain the most, since assistants name category leaders either way.
• Vendors with one cited listicle appeared in 4.1% of answers, against 11.5% for vendors with 10 or more. A set of listicles across the category's questions earns more visibility than a single roundup.
• Copilot named the listicle publisher in 62.5% of cases and ChatGPT in 56.5%, against 37.4% for Perplexity and 28.2% for Google AI Mode. This cut comes from a smaller sample of 814 cases. Expect the payoff from listicles to differ by assistant, so track each platform separately.
• One client's listicles were cited without a brand mention 41.5% of the time, against 5.3% for its product pages. Assistants use roundups as a source for every vendor listed, so product pages carry more of the brand-naming work.

Search usage statistics

1. Google handles more than 5 trillion searches a year. Google stated the figure in March 2025, based on its internal data from January 2025 (Google, January 2025 data). Search volume remains enormous, so the channel deserves a budget line even as AI answers absorb part of it.

2. Google held 89.94% of worldwide search engine market share in September 2026. Bing followed at 5.29%, with Yahoo at 1.36% (Statcounter, September 2026). Google still controls nine in ten searches worldwide, so AI work should sit on top of a sound SEO base.

3. Google had 73.7% of US desktop search activity in Q4 2025, and ChatGPT had 2.86%. SparkToro and Datos measured searches across 41 sites, including Amazon (7.83%), Bing (4.31%) and YouTube (3.65%) (SparkToro, Q4 2025 data). ChatGPT is a fast-growing research channel, but Google still accounts for about three quarters of US desktop search activity.

4. ChatGPT reached more than 900 million weekly active users. OpenAI also reported more than 50 million consumer subscribers (OpenAI, February 2026). Your buyers already use ChatGPT, so your brand needs a presence in its answers to category questions.

5. The Gemini app has 950 million monthly active users. Google said daily active users tripled over the prior year (Google, July 2026). Gemini now reaches a ChatGPT-sized audience, so track it as its own surface in your AI visibility reporting.

6. Google AI Mode passed 1 billion monthly active users. Google reported the figure in its Q2 2026 earnings remarks, counting from the global rollout in October 2025 (Google, July 2026). AI Mode is now mainstream, so test your priority prompts there and not only in classic results.

7. AI Overviews had more than 2 billion monthly users across 200+ countries. Google added that AI Overviews drove over 10% more queries for the query types that show them (Google, Q2 2025). Informational keywords now meet an AI summary first, so your pages need to be the source it quotes.

8. AI Mode queries averaged 7.22 words, against 4.0 words for classic Google searches. Semrush analyzed nearly 69 million US desktop sessions from May to July 2025 (Semrush, May to July 2025 data). Longer queries carry more context, so build pages that answer specific use cases and buyer situations.

9. Mobile devices produced 58.99% of worldwide web traffic in September 2026. Desktop accounted for 39.26% and tablets for 1.76% (Statcounter, September 2026). B2B research still skews to desktop at work, but every page has to render and convert on a phone.

Clicks and CTR statistics after AI Overviews

10. Users clicked a traditional result on 8% of Google visits when an AI summary appeared, against 15% without one. Pew tracked the browsing of 900 US adults in March 2025 (Pew Research Center, March 2025 data). Plan for fewer clicks per ranking on informational terms and judge those pages on visibility and assisted pipeline.

11. Users clicked a link inside the AI summary on only 1% of visits. The same Pew study found that 18% of searches in its sample produced an AI summary (Pew Research Center, March 2025 data). A citation in an AI Overview builds awareness more than traffic, so measure it as brand exposure.

12. Users ended their browsing session on 26% of results pages with an AI summary, against 16% without one (Pew Research Center, March 2025 data). Many buyers stop at the answer, so your positioning has to appear inside it.

13. Position-one CTR is about 58% lower when an AI Overview appears. Ahrefs compared 300,000 keywords in December 2025 against December 2023 (Ahrefs, December 2025 data). Traffic forecasts built on pre-2024 CTR curves overstate clicks, so recalibrate them with your own Search Console data.

14. Organic CTR on queries with an AI Overview fell 61%, from 1.76% in June 2024 to 0.61% in September 2025. Seer measured 3,119 informational queries across 42 client organizations (Seer Interactive, September 2025 data). Top-of-funnel blog traffic will keep shrinking, so shift budget toward decision-stage pages that still earn clicks.

15. Organic CTR also fell 41% on queries without an AI Overview, to 1.62%. Seer tracked the same 15-month window (Seer Interactive, September 2025 data). Click decline now affects the whole results page, so compare your CTR trend against this baseline before blaming your content.

16. Brands cited in an AI Overview earned 35% higher organic CTR than brands that were not cited. Cited pages averaged 0.70% organic CTR in Q3 2025, against 0.52% for uncited pages (Seer Interactive, Q3 2025 data). Earning the citation protects part of the click, so optimize key pages for AI Overview inclusion and not only for rank.

17. 68.01% of US Google searches ended without a click in January to April 2026. The zero-click rate was 60.45% in 2024 (SparkToro, January to April 2026 data). Fewer than a third of searches send a click, so brand recall from search exposure now drives part of your pipeline.

18. Only 6% to 8% of AI Mode sessions led to a visit to another website. Semrush found 92% to 94% of AI Mode sessions were zero-click in its 2025 clickstream sample (Semrush, May to July 2025 data). AI Mode rewards being named in the answer, so track mention rate there alongside clicks.

19. AI Overviews appeared on 21.4% of informational SERPs but only 4.3% of commercial and 2.1% of transactional SERPs. Ahrefs analyzed about 146 million desktop SERPs (Ahrefs, September 2025 data). Commercial and transactional keywords still behave like classic search, so they remain the safest SEO investment for SaaS.

20. AI Overviews appeared on 10.8% of software and services queries, against a 25% average across industries. Conductor measured AI Overview presence across 10 industries from September to October 2025 (Conductor, September to October 2025 data). Software keywords trigger AI Overviews at well below the cross-industry rate, so check your own keyword set before assuming the worst.

AI Mode and AI assistant citation statistics

21. Only about 12% of links cited by ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot also rank in Google's top 10 for the same query. Perplexity aligned closest with Google at 28.6% (Ahrefs, 2025 data across about 15,000 prompts). Ranking on Google does not guarantee an AI citation, so audit which pages assistants actually cite for your prompts.

22. About 38% of AI Overview citations also rank in the top 10, down from about 76% in July 2025. Ahrefs analyzed 863,000 keyword SERPs and about 4 million cited URLs (Ahrefs, early 2026 data). AI Overviews now pull from the sub-queries behind a question, so cover the related questions around each topic.

23. Branded web mentions correlated with AI Overview visibility at 0.664, ahead of backlinks at 0.218. Ahrefs studied 75,000 brands (Ahrefs, 2025 data). Third-party mentions predict AI visibility better than link counts, so invest in coverage on the sites assistants read.

24. Brands in the top quarter for web mentions averaged 169 AI Overview mentions, more than 10 times the next quarter. About 26% of brands had no AI Overview mentions at all (Ahrefs, 2025 data). AI visibility concentrates in brands people already talk about, so a niche SaaS brand needs a deliberate mentions plan.

25. AI-cited content is 25.7% fresher on average than the pages Google ranks organically. ChatGPT showed the strongest preference for recent pages in a study of 17 million citations (Ahrefs, 2025 data). Stale pages lose AI citations first, so schedule refreshes for the pages that drive your pipeline.

26. About 94% of links cited by AI assistants point to non-paid media. Just under 25% point to journalism. Muck Rack analyzed more than 1 million links from AI responses between July and December 2025 (Muck Rack, July to December 2025 data). Assistants lean on third-party sources, so earned media and roundup placements belong in the AI search plan.

27. More than half of the links AI assistants cite were published in the previous 12 months (Muck Rack, July to December 2025 data). A placement from three years ago carries little weight in AI answers, so keep earning fresh coverage.

28. Comparison pages with three tables earned 25.7% more ChatGPT citations. AirOps compared 217,508 pages that ChatGPT retrieved for 7,500 commercial prompts (AirOps, 2026 data). Structured comparison content gets cited, so give your alternatives and versus pages clear tables.

29. "Best of" shortlist pages with sentences of 10 words or fewer earned 18.8% more ChatGPT citations (AirOps, 2026 data). Short, scannable sentences help assistants extract your recommendation, so edit shortlist pages for clarity.

AI referral traffic and conversion statistics

30. AI platforms sent 0.32% of all website traffic in 2026, up from 0.24% in 2025 and 0.02% in 2024. Organic search sent 42.75% of traffic across the 101,574 sites SE Ranking tracked (SE Ranking, January 2025 to April 2026 data). AI referrals are small but growing by about a third a year, so segment them in GA4 now to see the trend early.

31. ChatGPT sent 74.78% of AI referral traffic in 2026, down from 79.74% in 2025. Gemini followed at 11.56%, Perplexity at 7.23%, Copilot at 3.51% and Claude at 2.62% (SE Ranking, January 2025 to April 2026 data). ChatGPT leads, but other assistants are gaining share, so track at least five of them.

32. AI referrals made up 3.37% of traffic to software and services sites, the highest share of any sub-industry Conductor measured. The average across all industries was 1.08% (Conductor, May to September 2025 data). SaaS sites see about three times the AI traffic of the average site, so AI search deserves its own line in your plan.

33. ChatGPT sent about 88.5% of AI referral traffic to IT sites (Conductor, May to September 2025 data). For software brands, ChatGPT is the first assistant to optimize for.

34. Google sent 210 times more traffic than ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity combined. AI accounted for 0.25% of the average site's traffic across 81,947 sites (Ahrefs, first half of 2025). Do not cut SEO to fund AI search, because Google still sends the bulk of qualified visits.

35. AI assistant visitors produced 12.1% of Ahrefs' signups from 0.5% of its traffic. Ahrefs calculated that AI search visitors converted at 23 times the rate of traditional organic visitors (Ahrefs, 30 days to June 2025). AI visitors arrive pre-sold, so judge AI search on signups and demo requests rather than sessions.

36. Visitors from LLMs signed up at 1.66%, against 0.15% for search visitors. Microsoft Clarity measured 1,277 publisher and news domains over one month (Microsoft Clarity, 2025 data). AI referrals convert above search on many sites, so give them a dedicated landing path and CTA.

37. AI platform traffic grew 155.6% over eight months, against 24.0% for search. AI referrals still made up less than 1% of traffic on the sites Clarity measured (Microsoft Clarity, 2025 data). Growth rates this steep compound fast, so set your AI baseline this quarter.

38. The average AI search visitor was worth 4.4 times the average organic visitor, based on conversion rate. Semrush projected that AI search could send more visitors than traditional search for marketing topics by early 2028 (Semrush, July 2025). Weight AI traffic by value in your forecasts, not by volume.

39. Traffic from generative AI tools to US retail sites rose 693.4% year over year in the 2025 holiday season (Adobe, November to December 2025 data). Consumers already buy through AI recommendations, and B2B buyers bring the same habit to software research.

B2B buying behavior statistics

40. 51% of B2B software buyers now start research with an AI chatbot more often than with Google, up from 29% a year earlier. G2 surveyed 1,076 software buyers in March 2026 (G2, March 2026 data). Half of your buyers begin in a chatbot, so your category story has to appear in its first answer.

41. 71% of B2B software buyers use AI chatbots at some point in their research (G2, March 2026 data). AI research now touches nearly every deal, so map the prompts buyers use at each stage.

42. 69% of software buyers chose a different vendor than planned because a chatbot recommended it (G2, March 2026 data). AI answers change shortlists, so a missing mention can cost you deals you never saw.

43. 85% of software buyers think more highly of a vendor when an AI chatbot includes it in an answer (G2, March 2026 data). An AI mention works like a third-party endorsement, so treat mention rate as a brand metric.

44. One in three software buyers bought from a vendor they had never heard of before (G2, March 2026 data). AI search lets challenger brands win deals, so a smaller SaaS company can compete with incumbents on prompts.

45. 94% of B2B buyers use LLMs in their buying process. 6sense surveyed nearly 4,000 buyers across North America, Europe and APAC (6sense, 2025 report). LLM research is now standard practice, so build content for how assistants summarize your category.

46. Buyers first contacted sellers 61% of the way through their journey, earlier than the 69% seen in 2023 and 2024 (6sense, 2025 report). About 60% of the decision happens before a sales call, so your content and AI presence do the early selling.

47. 95% of winning vendors were already on the buyer's day-one shortlist (6sense, 2025 report). If you are absent when the shortlist forms, sales rarely recovers the deal.

48. 94% of business buyers use AI in their buying process, up from 89% a year earlier. Twice as many buyers named generative AI as their top information source compared with vendor websites (Forrester, 2025 survey). Buyers trust AI summaries more than your website, so make sure assistants describe your product accurately.

49. 61% of business buyers use private AI tools provided by their employer (Forrester, 2025 survey). Much AI research happens in tools you cannot track, so add a "Where did you hear about us?" field to your forms.

Content and link building statistics

50. 74.2% of new web pages contained AI-generated content. Ahrefs checked 900,000 pages created in April 2025. Only 25.8% were fully human-written (Ahrefs, April 2025 data). AI drafting is now table stakes, so first-hand data and expert input are what set your content apart.

51. 86.5% of top-20 ranking pages contained some AI-generated content. Ahrefs scored about 600,000 ranking pages and found a correlation of 0.011 between AI content and rank (Ahrefs, 2025 data). Google neither rewards nor penalizes AI use, so judge content on usefulness and accuracy.

52. 35.4% of marketers plan to increase investment in their website, blog and SEO in 2026. HubSpot surveyed more than 1,500 marketers (HubSpot, 2026 report). Competitors keep funding search, so a pause on your side hands them share.

53. 40.6% of marketers named updating SEO for search changes as a top trend for 2026 (HubSpot, 2026 report). Your peers are rebuilding their SEO playbooks for AI answers, so audit yours this year.

54. Only 11% of link builders had a repeatable process for earning citations in AI-generated content. Citation Labs and BuzzStream surveyed more than 300 SEOs and link builders (Citation Labs, 2025 survey). Few teams have an AI citation process yet, so building one now is an early advantage.

55. 68% of link builders focus on blog content, against 41% on product or commercial pages (Citation Labs, 2025 survey). Links to commercial pages are less common, so pointing yours at money pages stands out.

Local search statistics

56. 97% of consumers read reviews for local businesses. Of those, 41% always do, up from 29% in 2025. BrightLocal surveyed 1,002 US adults (BrightLocal, 2026 survey). For SaaS, review sites such as G2 and Capterra play the same role, so keep your review flow active.

57. 45% of consumers use ChatGPT or other generative AI tools for local recommendations, up from 6% in 2025 (BrightLocal, 2026 survey). AI recommendations spread to every kind of purchase in one year, which signals how fast buyer habits change.

58. Google's share as a review source fell from 83% to 71% in one year (BrightLocal, 2026 survey). Reputation now lives across many platforms, so monitor the review sites assistants cite for your category.

59. 74% of consumers only look at reviews from the last three months (BrightLocal, 2026 survey). Recency drives trust, so a steady stream of new reviews beats a large old archive.

Technical SEO statistics

60. 48% of websites passed all Core Web Vitals on mobile in 2025, against 56% on desktop. Largest Contentful Paint was the weakest metric on mobile at a 62% pass rate (HTTP Archive Web Almanac, July 2025 data). Half of sites still fail on mobile, so fast load times remain a cheap edge over competitors.

61. Googlebot made up more than 28% of verified bot traffic on Cloudflare's network in 2025 (Cloudflare, 2025 data). Google's crawler still drives discovery, so crawl efficiency and clean indexing come first.

62. AI "user action" crawling grew more than 15 times in 2025. This is crawling triggered when a person asks an assistant a question that needs a live page (Cloudflare, 2025 data). Assistants now fetch pages at answer time, so block nothing they need in robots.txt or your firewall.

63. Anthropic had the highest crawl-to-referral ratio of the leading AI and search platforms in 2025 (Cloudflare, 2025 data). AI crawlers take far more than they send back in clicks, so value them for citations and mentions.

64. GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot did not render JavaScript in Vercel's test. They fetched JavaScript files but did not execute them (Vercel, December 2024, the newest public test of this behavior). Content that only appears after JavaScript runs is invisible to these crawlers, so serve key copy in the initial HTML.

SEO and AI search statistics from Flying Cat client work

Industry studies show the averages. Our client data shows what happens when a B2B SaaS team acts on them. Named clients come from our published case studies. Clients without a published case study appear anonymized, with percentages only.

• Demo requests from organic search and LLMs grew 73% in D2L's first year with us. Demo requests from ChatGPT grew 3.2x year over year (D2L case study, December 2025 to September 2026). AI search produces pipeline when the work targets the prompts buyers use to compare vendors.
• D2L went from appearing in 12% to 33% of tracked AI answers. It moved from 11th to 7th among learning platforms (D2L case study, December 2025 to September 2026). AI visibility responds to focused work within months, even for a brand competing against larger platforms.
• Leapsome grew organic and AI-sourced sales-accepted opportunities 48% while non-branded clicks fell 36%. A non-branded click became 2.3x more likely to turn into an opportunity (Leapsome case study, 2025). Falling clicks can coexist with rising pipeline when content targets buying intent.
• Leapsome's mentions in Google AI Overviews grew 5x from March to August 2025. Visitors from AI assistants converted to demo requests at more than twice the rate of other visitors in Q3 2025 (Leapsome case study, 2025). Our client data matches the industry finding that AI visitors convert above average.
• An enterprise procurement platform went from being named in 76% to 88% of ChatGPT category answers in four months. Its conversion rate on ChatGPT visits rose 2.6x year over year (enterprise procurement platform case study, 2026). A challenger can lead AI answers against much larger rivals with the right placements and pages.
• At the same procurement platform, ChatGPT answers citing the company's own site rose from 25% to 41%. One decision-stage page converted at 17%, against 0.24% for high-traffic educational pages (enterprise procurement platform case study, 2026). Decision-stage pages earn both citations and conversions, so they deserve the first share of budget.
• An ecommerce marketing platform tripled its top-3 rankings in France within six months. Organic conversions in France grew 60% in year one (ecommerce marketing platform case study, year one). Native-written local content outperforms translation in new markets.
• An AI tax research platform tripled its AI citation rate from 7.8% to 23.9% in its first two months with us. Visitors from chatgpt.com converted to free trial at 3.3%, against 2.0% for Google visitors (Flying Cat client data, July to September 2026). Citation rate can move within weeks. The AI traffic that follows converts above Google traffic.
• Flying Cat-produced pages made up 81% of a veterinary software client's content cited by AI in August 2026 (Flying Cat client data, August 2026). New pages built for buyer questions become the pages assistants cite.
• Measured ChatGPT sessions fell by roughly half in one week in October 2026 across several of our B2B SaaS clients after ChatGPT changed its interface. Demo requests from ChatGPT kept their August and September pace (Flying Cat client data, October 2026). AI referral sessions are an unstable metric, so report on demo requests and engaged sessions instead.

How to use these SEO statistics in your 2026 plan

Read together, the data points in one direction. Clicks per ranking are falling on informational searches. AI answers are absorbing the top of the funnel. B2B buyers form shortlists in chatbots before they talk to sales. Google still sends far more traffic than every assistant combined. Commercial keywords still behave like classic search.

• Protect commercial rankings. Comparison, alternatives, pricing and use-case pages still earn clicks and convert. Our B2B SEO guide covers how we prioritize them.
• Measure AI visibility directly. Track mention rate, citations and share of voice across a prompt set, as described in our SEO metrics guide and the AEO guide chapter on measurement.
• Earn third-party mentions. Branded mentions and fresh earned media predict AI visibility better than link counts. Our off-site visibility chapter explains how we choose placements.
• Fix what crawlers cannot read. Serve key copy in HTML and keep Core Web Vitals healthy. The chapter on whether AI can read your site walks through the checks.

If you need to build the case internally, our guides on the business case for SEO and forecasting SEO growth show how to turn these numbers into a budget request.

Flying Cat is a founder-led SEO and AI search consultancy for B2B SaaS. Our founder leads strategy on every account, working with freelance specialists who know each client's vertical, in English, French, German, Italian and Spanish. If you want to see where your brand stands in Google and in AI answers, explore our GEO and AEO service and SEO strategy service, or book a call.