AI search statistics on one page with the source for each: how many Google queries show an AI Overview, what happens to organic clicks when one appears, how much each AI engine's citations overlap with Google's top ten, and seven figures Search Standing measured directly in 2026 with the market and date for each.
Third-party figures cited to the study with its date. Our own figures dated and placed. Updated October 2026.
Semrush measured AI Overviews on 6.49 percent of US desktop Google queries in January 2025 and 13.14 percent by March 2025, roughly doubling in two months. Later studies with other query sets report higher levels. The level depends on the sample and method; every published study shows the same direction.
For B2B buyers the practical reading is that a category search now often returns an answer before a list. Informational and question-form queries trigger Overviews far more often than navigational ones; in Semrush's September 2024 sample of Overview-triggering keywords, about 80 percent were informational. The questions a B2B buyer asks before building a shortlist are mostly of that kind.
Seer Interactive measured organic click-through on informational queries at 0.61 percent when an AI Overview appeared in September 2025, against 1.62 percent without one. When the brand was cited inside the Overview, its Q3 2025 average was 0.70 percent; when it was not, 0.52 percent. Being in the answer recovers part of the click.
The consequence is that "zero-click search," which was a consumer phenomenon in 2020, is now a B2B one. A buyer who asks a question and gets an answer with three named companies does not click a fourth. The way back is to be one of the three. That is the whole argument for measuring AI visibility separately from rank: a company can hold position four and be invisible, because position four is below the answer.
Ahrefs analyzed 1.9 million citations from 1 million AI Overviews and found 76.1 percent of cited pages rank in Google's top ten (July 2025). Semrush's September 2024 data showed the number-one organic result among the Overview's links 46 percent of the time on desktop and 34 percent on mobile. Ranking gets a page into the pool; the passage decides whether it is quoted. Comparable published figures for ChatGPT, Gemini and AI Mode vary too widely to cite.
We cite only the overlap figures we could trace to a named study with a date. For the other engines we report our own counts, below, on named companies on stated dates.
Seven figures from our own analyses in 2026, each with the market and date. Across seven companies in one industrial market in July, five had purchased or spam backlinks and none appeared in the AI Overview for their category. One commercial printer in August had 44 ChatGPT mentions and 2 AI Overview appearances in one week, with 96 percent of its organic traffic on one page. A fulfillment term was priced at $32.57 a click at difficulty 14. One of three robotics integrators measured in October had a server error indexed as its homepage title.
These are published because a claim nobody can check is worth nothing. Each was measured with Semrush domain, organic and backlink reports, Google Search Console where available, and direct queries to each AI engine. The statistics page carries the third-party research these sit beside, and the timeline page carries the week-by-week chart from the domain we built ourselves.
As a direction, not a forecast. Prevalence will keep rising; the exact share on any given day is not the point. Click-through on Overview queries will stay low; the point is to be in the Overview. Overlap with rankings varies by engine; the point is that ChatGPT needs its own work. Our own measurements are small samples; the point is that the faults they found recur, and each can be checked in minutes on your own site.
Figures described as measured are from Search Standing's own analyses using Semrush, Google Search Console and direct queries to each AI engine, on the dates stated. Published ranges move quarter to quarter; the patterns are what we rely on.
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