AI Search in Numbers: Usage Data for AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity

How many people are using AI search in 2026?

More than a billion, on Google’s own numbers. Alphabet’s second-quarter 2026 earnings reported AI Mode above one billion monthly users and Gemini at around 950 million. Those are two different products with overlapping audiences, so they cannot be added together. Read them as one signal: AI answers are now a default surface, not an experiment.

What the Alphabet figures do and do not say

They say reach. They say nothing about how often each person uses the feature, or how many clicks reach a publisher afterward. A monthly user is anyone who touched the product once in a month. Treat the number as the size of the room rather than the volume of the conversation.

Why reach matters even without clicks

If your brand is never named in an AI answer, you are absent from the place where a billion people now start. That absence costs you consideration before any click is at stake. The mechanics behind inclusion are set out in what is ai seo.

Which assistants hold the audience?

Still ChatGPT, but by a shrinking margin. Similarweb’s 2026 count of roughly 9.5 billion monthly visits to generative AI sites puts ChatGPT at 53 percent of that traffic, down from 76 percent a year earlier, with Gemini between 27 and 28 percent. Perplexity reported 780 million queries in May 2025 and has published no verified monthly figure since.

A two-player market with a long tail

Two products now hold roughly four fifths of generative AI visits. For a brand, that means two systems to be legible to rather than ten. The remaining share is spread across assistants that matter in specific niches, including research and coding tools.

Share moves faster here than in search

A 23-point shift in one year is unusual in any mature channel. It tells you that habits are still forming and that a lead is not a moat. Planning for 2027 on the assumption that today’s leader will still hold half the traffic is the riskiest assumption in the table below.

Does AI-referred traffic actually buy?

On the retail evidence, yes, and better than average. Adobe Analytics reported AI-referred traffic to US retail sites up 393 percent year over year in 2026, with those sessions converting 42 percent better than the typical visit. The volume is still a small slice of total traffic. The quality is the finding worth acting on.

Why these visits convert better

Somebody who arrives from an assistant has already had their basic questions answered. They know roughly what the product is, what it costs and who the alternatives are. The page they land on has to confirm a decision rather than start one, which is a different writing job.

Measure it as its own channel

Most analytics setups still fold assistant referrals into direct or other. Separate them, name them, and watch conversion by landing page. Without that split you cannot tell whether a 393 percent rise applies to your own site, and website visibility work gets judged on the wrong numbers.

How far has AI use spread in Turkey?

Unevenly, and that gap is the local opportunity. TÜİK, Turkey’s official statistics institute, reported for 2025 that 19.2 percent of individuals had used generative AI, rising to 39.4 percent among those aged 16 to 24. Among enterprises the figure was 7.5 percent. Turkish consumers are adopting these tools roughly two and a half times faster than Turkish companies.

Young users set the next search habit

Nearly four in ten people aged 16 to 24 already use generative AI, on TÜİK’s 2025 reading. That cohort will be the default buyer in most consumer categories within a few years. Their first question about a brand is increasingly asked to an assistant rather than typed into a results page.

The enterprise gap is a visibility gap

At 7.5 percent enterprise use, most Turkish companies are not yet testing how they appear in AI answers. Checking your own brand in two assistants once a month costs nothing and still puts you ahead of the field. You can see the wider picture in our turkey digital statistics round-up. The TÜİK series itself is published on the TÜİK data portal.

Why do these numbers disagree with each other?

Because they count different things. Alphabet counts monthly users of its own products. Similarweb counts visits to websites, which misses app and in-search usage entirely. Perplexity counted queries. Adobe counted referrals to retail sites. Four units, four methods, and no honest way to add them into one total.

Users, visits and queries are not interchangeable

One user can make hundreds of visits, and one visit can carry several queries. A headline that mixes the three produces a number nobody can reproduce. When you quote a figure, quote the unit and the source in the same sentence.

Watch the age of the figure

Perplexity’s 780 million queries belong to May 2025. It is a real number and it is also a year and a half old, which in this market is a long time. Any figure in this field without a month attached should be treated as decoration.

What the data should change on your side

Three practical moves follow from the figures above. Make your pages quotable, measure assistant referrals separately, and stop planning around a single leader. None of this requires a new budget line in 2026. It requires the same content work judged against a second surface, with a monthly check instead of an annual one.

Write pages an assistant can quote

Short factual answers near the top, clear headings, named sources and real specifications. Google’s own documentation on AI features in Search says the same technical basics apply as for normal results. Reasons brands get left out are examined in chatgpt does not mention my brand.

Three checks worth running monthly

Keep the measurement light enough that it survives a busy month:

• Ask two assistants a buying question in your category and note who is named.
• Check assistant referrals and their conversion rate as a separate channel.
• Re-read any figure in your sales deck older than six months.

Plan for a split market, not a winner

With ChatGPT at 53 percent and Gemini near 28 percent on Similarweb’s 2026 count, betting on one is a bet on a trend line that has already moved 23 points in a year. Build for both, and the full order of work sits in visibility services.

Frequently Asked Questions

Short Glossary

AI Mode

AI Mode is the conversational answer layer inside Google Search, where a question is answered in prose with links rather than a plain list of results.

Monthly active user

Monthly active user is a count of distinct people who used a product at least once in a month, which says nothing about how often they used it.

Referral traffic

Referral traffic is the share of visits that arrive from another site or tool, identified by the source the visitor came from.

Next Step

Pick the three figures above that touch your category and write them into your plan with their source and year attached. Then run the monthly checks for a quarter before you change any budget. If you want the reading done against your own category rather than the market average, start from the website visibility questions.

Updated: October 2026