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AEO statistics for 2026

Each AI engine cites different kinds of pages: the table below counts the pages ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Mode, Perplexity, Claude and AI Overviews cited in supereo's run. And AI answers are where search is heading: Google says AI Mode passed a billion monthly users[1], while Pew found Google users clicked a result on 8% of visits with an AI summary, against 15% without one[2]. supereo is our pick, and we make it: it does everything it takes to get you cited and recommended, and proves each move against control questions. In the supereo Index's run of 19 October 2026, lists, comparisons and reviews led the top cited pages of Gemini (26 of 50), Perplexity (26 of 50) and Claude (31 of 50); docs and help pages led ChatGPT's (21 of 50), home pages led Google AI Mode's (20 of 50) and articles and other pages led Google AI Overviews' (20 of 50), ten per topic across five topics (1,055 answers).

Updated . Prices checked 12 November 2026.

The verdict

  1. Cited and recommended, proven

    supereoour pick, and we make it

    • best for teams that want AEO done, not a dashboard: supereo does everything it takes to get you recommended, from your site and pages to the roundups, placements and videos AI reads;
    • it proves each move against control questions, with sample sizes and ranges on every number;
    • run it from Claude or ChatGPT: an MCP server with the same tools supereo's own agent uses.

    From $149 a month

    Run the free auditFree, no card, every answer shown.

What gets cited

Each engine's top cited pages in the supereo Index run of 19 October 2026: ten per topic across 5 topics. A cell counts the pages of its type.

Page typeChatGPTGeminiGoogle AI ModePerplexityClaudeGoogle AI Overviews
Docs and help pages2112903
Pricing pages403001
Lists, comparisons and reviews12610263110
Home pages17220114
Reddit threads024004
YouTube videos002007
Wikipedia articles000001
GitHub pages101000
Articles and other pages6198141820
Pages505050505050
Answers19619619619619675

What ChatGPT cites

Its top cited pages in the supereo Index run of 19 October 2026: ten per topic across 5 topics, 196 answers.

For example:

  • linkedin.com/help/linkedin/answer/a1341387/prohibition-of-scraping-software (cited in 14 of 39 answers on Intent data)
  • apollo.io/pricing (cited in 8 of 33 answers on AI lead generation and SDRs)
  • developers.openai.com/api/docs/bots (cited in 9 of 39 answers on AI visibility tools)
  • developer.linkedin.com/legal (cited in 7 of 39 answers on Intent data)
  • help.openai.com/en/articles/12627856-publishers-and-developers-faq (cited in 7 of 39 answers on AI visibility tools)

What Gemini cites

Its top cited pages in the supereo Index run of 19 October 2026: ten per topic across 5 topics, 196 answers.

For example:

  • sintra.ai/blog/ai-email-assistant (cited in 8 of 39 answers on AI email assistants)
  • missiveapp.com/blog/ai-email-assistant (cited in 7 of 39 answers on AI email assistants)
  • fireflies.ai/blog/best-ai-email-assistant (cited in 4 of 39 answers on AI email assistants)
  • goextrovert.com/blog/best-linkedin-engagement-tools (cited in 4 of 39 answers on Intent data)
  • traxy.ai/blog/blog-best-trigify-alternatives-2026 (cited in 4 of 39 answers on Intent data)

What Google AI Mode cites

Its top cited pages in the supereo Index run of 19 October 2026: ten per topic across 5 topics, 196 answers.

For example:

  • clay.com (cited in 7 of 39 answers on Intent data)
  • apify.com (cited in 4 of 39 answers on Intent data)
  • apollo.io (cited in 4 of 39 answers on Intent data)
  • heyreach.io/blog/best-trigify-alternatives (cited in 4 of 39 answers on Intent data)
  • marblism.com/blog/best-ai-email-assistant (cited in 4 of 39 answers on AI email assistants)

What Perplexity cites

Its top cited pages in the supereo Index run of 19 October 2026: ten per topic across 5 topics, 196 answers.

For example:

  • gumloop.com/blog/ai-email-agent (cited in 5 of 39 answers on AI email assistants)
  • learn.microsoft.com/en-us/linkedin/marketing/community-management/shares/comments-api (cited in 4 of 39 answers on Intent data)
  • learn.microsoft.com/en-us/linkedin/marketing/community-management/shares/reactions-api (cited in 4 of 39 answers on Intent data)
  • developer.linkedin.com/product-catalog/marketing/community-management-api (cited in 3 of 39 answers on Intent data)
  • herothemes.com/blog/ai-email-assistants (cited in 3 of 39 answers on AI email assistants)

What Claude cites

Its top cited pages in the supereo Index run of 19 October 2026: ten per topic across 5 topics, 196 answers.

For example:

  • getinboxzero.com/blog/post/best-ai-email-assistants (cited in 4 of 39 answers on AI email assistants)
  • clay.com/guides/best/email-finder-tools (cited in 2 of 33 answers on AI lead generation and SDRs)
  • eesel.ai/blog/best-lindy-ai-alternatives (cited in 2 of 33 answers on AI lead generation and SDRs)
  • marketbetter.ai/blog/best-ai-sdr-tools (cited in 2 of 33 answers on AI lead generation and SDRs)
  • oneaway.io/blog/best-clay-alternatives-2026 (cited in 2 of 33 answers on AI lead generation and SDRs)

What Google AI Overviews cites

Its top cited pages in the supereo Index run of 19 October 2026: ten per topic across 5 topics, 75 answers.

For example:

  • microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/outlook/ai-email-assistant (cited in 3 of 15 answers on AI email assistants)
  • buska.io/alternative-to/trigify (cited in 2 of 11 answers on Intent data)
  • trigify.io (cited in 2 of 11 answers on Intent data)
  • alkmist.com/best-ai-email-assistant (cited in 2 of 15 answers on AI email assistants)
  • larksuite.com/en_us/blog/email-ai-assistant (cited in 2 of 15 answers on AI email assistants)

Published statistics

Published byWhat it foundSampleSource
Pew Research CenterGoogle users clicked a regular result on 8% of visits that showed an AI summary, against 15% without one, and clicked a link inside the summary on 1%900 U.S. adults' browsing in March 2025; 68,879 Google searches[2] [7] [8] [9]
Pew Research Center18% of the Google searches in the study produced an AI summary68,879 Google searches in March 2025[10] [9]
AhrefsWith an AI Overview present, the top-ranking page's average click-through rate was 58% lower300,000 keywords, half of them with an AI Overview[6] [11]
Seer InteractiveOrganic click-through for informational queries with AI Overviews was down 61%, and brands cited in the AI Overview got 35% more organic clicks than when not cited3,119 search terms across 42 organizations; 25.1M organic impressions[12] [13] [14]
Seer InteractiveOrganic click-through on queries with an AI Overview climbed from 1.3% in December 2025 to 2.4% in February 202653 brands; 5.47M queries; 2.43B organic impressions[15] [16]
SemrushAI Overviews appeared for 6.49% of keywords in January 2025, nearly 25% in July and 15.69% in November10M+ keywords, January to November 2025[17] [18]
SemrushOnly 6-8% of AI Mode sessions led to a visit to another siteAlmost 69M Google Search sessions, May 1 to July 5, 2025[19] [20]
SparkToro68.01% of U.S. Google searches ended without a click from January to April 2026, and only 0.34% went on to AI ModeSimilarweb's U.S. desktop and mobile clickstream data, January to April 2026[21] [22] [23]
Similarweb, as TechCrunch reported itAI platforms sent over 1.13 billion referrals to the top 1,000 websites in June 2025, against 191 billion from Google SearchThe top 1,000 websites worldwide, June 2025[24]
BrightEdgeChatGPT's part of AI referral traffic rose to 95.1% in 2026; in August, Gemini sent 2.4%, Perplexity 1.1% and Claude 0.8%not stated[25] [26]
OpenAIChatGPT has 1.2B weekly usersOpenAI's own count[4]
GoogleAI Mode passed a billion monthly active users a year after launch, with its queries more than doubling every quarterGoogle's own count[1]
GoogleAI Overviews had over 2 billion monthly users across more than 200 countries and territoriesGoogle's own count[5]
Ahrefs37.9% of URLs cited in AI Overviews also ranked in the first 10 results, and YouTube URLs that didn't rank in Google's top 100 were 5.6% of all AI Overview citations863K keyword results pages; 4M AI Overview URLs[27] [28] [29]
AhrefsOnly 12% of links cited by ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot ranked in Google's top 10 for the same prompt; for Perplexity, nearly 1 in 3 did15,000 prompts[30]
Ahrefs“Best X” blog lists were 43.8% of the page types ChatGPT cited for software, product and agency prompts750 prompts[31] [32]
Seer InteractiveAmong the highest-volume cited pages, 75% were updated in the last year, but only 40% were first published that recently7,683 cited pages carrying 47,097 citations[33] [34]
Ahrefs50–83% of AI citations were gone the next day, and about 75% of those came back within 20 daysFive AI tools, followed for 20 days[3]
SE RankingOnly 9.2% of the exact URLs AI Mode cited matched across three runs of the same queriesThree runs of the same keywords[35]
Chartbeat, in the Reuters Institute reportGoogle organic search traffic to over 2,500 news sites fell 33% globally between Nov 2024 and Nov 2025Over 2,500 sites in Chartbeat's network[36]

How to read these numbers

The table of page types comes from supereo's own run: the same buyer questions asked once on each chat engine, and their search keywords on Google AI Overviews, in each of the Index's topics. It counts each engine's top cited pages, not every page it cited, so read it as what each engine leans on.

The published statistics come from their publishers, each with its sample. Where a study measures clicks, it measures Google; where it counts citations, it counts the engines it names.

What the numbers mean for AEO

Each engine leans on different kinds of pages, as the table shows, so no one kind of page reaches them all. That is why supereo works on your site and off it: your own pages, and the lists, reviews, threads and videos the engines read.

And AI citations move from one day to the next[3], so a single check can't show what a change did: measure it against control questions, as supereo does.

Have it done: supereo

01supereoour pick, and we make it

  • best for teams that want AEO done, not a dashboard: supereo does everything it takes to get you recommended, from your site and pages to the roundups, placements and videos AI reads;
  • it proves each move against control questions, with sample sizes and ranges on every number;
  • run it from Claude or ChatGPT: an MCP server with the same tools supereo's own agent uses.

From $149 a month

  • Does the worksupereo writes those pages for you, aimed at the questions where AI skips you. supereo.app
  • Proves it against controlsEach change targets a set of questions, and we compare them with a matched set the change can't affect. supereo.app
  • Runs from Claude or ChatGPTRun the same loop from Claude, Cursor or Codex. Your agent gets every tool supereo's own agent uses: your buyers' questions, every answer, the pages AI cites, your brand facts. supereo.app
  • Free auditfree audit // about 2 minutes // no card supereo.app
PlanA monthPromptsAI engines
Copilot$14940ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude
Autopilot$49940ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude

Prices from supereo.app, checked 12 November 2026. What it does, from its own pages, checked 9 November 2026.

How the proof works, with every number it runs on: How supereo measures.

Questions

What are the key AEO statistics for 2026?

Each AI engine cites different kinds of pages, counted in the table from supereo's run of six engines. Google's AI Mode passed a billion monthly users[1], ChatGPT has 1.2B weekly users[4], and Pew found people click a result less often when an AI summary shows[2].

How many people use AI search?

ChatGPT has 1.2B weekly users, by OpenAI's count[4]. Google says AI Mode passed a billion monthly users[1] and AI Overviews over 2 billion[5].

Do AI Overviews reduce clicks?

Several studies say so. One found the top result's click-through rate 58% lower with an AI Overview present[6], and Pew found clicks on 8% of visits with an AI summary against 15% without one[2].

What kinds of pages do AI engines cite?

It depends on the engine: the table above counts each one's top cited pages by type, from supereo's run.

How stable are AI citations?

Not very: one study found 50–83% of AI citations gone the next day[3]. Measure over repeated runs, against a control.

How we compiled this

Where this page's words say how an AI engine finds, reads or cites pages, the sentence links the engine's own documentation, or another source, and the day it was read.

What each engine cites comes from the supereo Index's newest run: the same buyer questions asked once on each chat engine, and their search keywords on Google AI Overviews, in each of the Index's topics, with every page each answer cited kept. For each engine and topic the run keeps the ten pages its answers cited in the largest number of answers, and how many cited each, and this page counts those pages by type.

A page's type comes from its address alone: a Reddit, YouTube, Wikipedia or GitHub page by its site, a home page when its address has no path, a pricing page when its address ends in /pricing, a docs or help page when it is on a docs, developers, help, support or learn site, or under /docs, /help or /hc, a list, comparison or review when its address names best, top, alternatives, vs, versus, compare, review or tools and every other page an article or other page. An AEO tool's own page counts in its type but is never named as an example, and neither is a search engine's results page; in AI visibility tools, the topic supereo competes in, the only examples are the AI engines' makers' own docs and help pages. The findings are about what gets cited, not which tool.

Each published statistic is in its publisher's own words under Sources, with the day we read it, and its sample size where the source states one.

We make supereo, so it is the one tool this page names as a pick.

How supereo measures its own results, with every number it runs on: How supereo measures.

supereo (supereo.app) is an AI agent that does everything it takes to get your brand recommended by ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google, on your site and off it: site fixes, new pages, roundups, placements and video. It proves what worked against control questions. Made by superagnt.

Sources

  1. One year ago, we launched AI Mode in the United States. Now, it has surpassed a billion monthly active users globally and AI Mode queries have more than doubled every quarter since launch. blog.google, read 4 November 2026.
  2. Users who encountered an AI summary clicked on a traditional search result link in 8% of all visits. Those who did not encounter an AI summary clicked on a search result nearly twice as often (15% of visits). pewresearch.org, read 4 November 2026.
  3. Don't judge AI visibility from one check. 50–83% of citations are gone the next day, but about 75% of those come back within 20 days. Count how many of the last seven days you were cited. ahrefs.com, read 4 November 2026.
  4. We also expanded our commitment to an open ecosystem by opening up ChatGPT as a shared surface where humans and agents can collaborate and where developers can directly launch new native experiences to our collective 1.2B weekly users. openai.com, read 4 November 2026.
  5. AI Mode has launched in the U.S. and India, and is going well, while AI Overviews now has over 2 billion monthly users across more than 200 countries and territories and 40 languages. blog.google, read 4 November 2026.
  6. To find out, we re-ran our study using data from December 2025. We found that the presence of an AI Overview now correlates with a 58% lower average clickthrough rate for the top-ranking page. ahrefs.com, read 4 November 2026.
  7. This analysis uses the web browsing data of 900 U.S. adults who are members of KnowledgePanel Digital, an online survey panel whose respondents agree to install an app that tracks their online browsing behavior. For each respondent, we received a list of all the URLs they visited on a tracked device during March 1-31, 2025. pewresearch.org, read 4 November 2026.
  8. The total dataset used in this analysis contains 68,879 unique Google searches. Some 12,593 of these searches produced an AI summary to accompany the standard search results. pewresearch.org, read 4 November 2026.
  9. Overall, around one-in-five Google searches in March 2025 produced an AI summary. Some 18% of all the Google searches in our study generated an AI summary as part of the search results. pewresearch.org, read 4 November 2026.
  10. We selected 300,000 keywords from Ahrefs Keywords Explorer database, consisting of 150,000 keywords with an AI Overview present and 150,000 keywords with informational intent and no AI Overview present. ahrefs.com, read 4 November 2026.
  11. Organic CTRs for informational queries with AIOs are down 61%. seerinteractive.com, read 4 November 2026.
  12. When you are cited in an AIO, you get 35% more organic clicks and 91% more paid clicks compared to when you are not cited at all. seerinteractive.com, read 4 November 2026.
  13. For this study, we’ve analyzed informational and educational queries, most vulnerable to AIOs, from June 2024 through September 2025. That’s 3,119 search terms across 42 client organizations and 25.1M organic impressions and 1.1M paid impressions tracked in this period. seerinteractive.com, read 4 November 2026.
  14. Organic CTR on AIO-present queries climbed from a floor of 1.3% in December 2025 to 2.4% in February 2026. seerinteractive.com, read 4 November 2026.
  15. From January 2025 through February 2026, we tracked 53 brands across paid and organic search, using only search terms with complete data across every month. That’s 5.47M queries, 2.43B organic impressions, 296.9M paid impressions. seerinteractive.com, read 4 November 2026.
  16. After starting the year at appearing for 6.49% of keywords in January 2025, the share rose to nearly 25% in July before sliding down to 15.69% in November 2025. semrush.com, read 4 November 2026.
  17. We looked at 10M+ keywords from January 2025 through November 2025 to find the percentage of all queries that trigger an AI Overview. semrush.com, read 4 November 2026.
  18. From our clickstream sample, we saw that, on average, 6-8% of AI Mode sessions led to someone visiting an external domain. That means 92-94% of AI Mode searches were zero-click searches. semrush.com, read 4 November 2026.
  19. First, we took clickstream data for almost 69M Google Search sessions that happened between May 1 and July 5, 2025 semrush.com, read 4 November 2026.
  20. In the first four months of 2026, a whopping 68.01% of Google searches ended without a click. sparktoro.com, read 4 November 2026.
  21. For those who theorized that AI Mode caused this change, it’s not there yet. Only 0.34% of searches made their way to AI Mode from January–April 2026. sparktoro.com, read 4 November 2026.
  22. Data for this study comes from Similarweb’s desktop and mobile web panel for January – April 2026 (US). sparktoro.com, read 4 November 2026.
  23. According to new data from market intelligence provider Similarweb, AI platforms in June generated over 1.13 billion referrals to the top 1,000 websites globally, a figure that’s up 357% since June 2024. However, Google Search still accounts for the majority of traffic to these sites, accounting for 191 billion referrals during the same period of June 2025. techcrunch.com, read 4 November 2026.
  24. Referral traffic from ChatGPT increased 101% from January to August this year, while its share of AI-generated referrals rose to a 2026 high of 95.1%. brightedge.com, read 4 November 2026.
  25. In August, Gemini accounted for 2.4% of AI referral traffic, followed by Perplexity at 1.1% and Claude at 0.8%. brightedge.com, read 4 November 2026.
  26. From this, we discovered that 37.9% of URLs cited in AI Overviews also appeared within the first 10 blocks. The rest were almost evenly split between positions 11–100 (31.2%) and beyond the top 100 blocks (31.0%). ahrefs.com, read 4 November 2026.
  27. Among the AI Overview cited pages that didn’t rank in Google’s top 100 results for the same keyword, 18.2% were YouTube URLs. And those YouTube URLs accounted for 5.6% of all AI Overview URLs cited across the dataset. ahrefs.com, read 4 November 2026.
  28. This time around, we analyzed 863K keyword SERPs, and a grand total of 4M AI Overview URLs—over double our last analysis. ahrefs.com, read 4 November 2026.
  29. In a dataset of 15,000 prompts, we found that—on average—only 12% of links cited by ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot appear in Google's top 10 results for the same prompt. Perplexity is the outlier: nearly 1 in 3 of its citations point to pages that rank in the top 10 for the target query. ahrefs.com, read 4 November 2026.
  30. Across all source links, "best X" blog lists represented 43.8% of all page types ahrefs.com, read 4 November 2026.
  31. I analyzed ChatGPT responses across 750 top-of-the-funnel prompts in three categories: software, products, and agency recommendations (e.g., ‘the best web design agencies in London’). ahrefs.com, read 4 November 2026.
  32. Among the highest-volume cited pages, 75% were updated in the last year but only 40% were first published that recently. seerinteractive.com, read 4 November 2026.
  33. I could date about two thirds of them, 7,683 pages carrying 47,097 citations. seerinteractive.com, read 4 November 2026.
  34. The average overlap of exact URLs between the three datasets was just 9.2%. This means that AI Mode often chooses completely different pages each time, even when the query doesn’t change. seranking.com, read 4 November 2026.
  35. Aggregate data, sourced from the analytics company Chartbeat for this report, show that Google traffic from organic search to over 2,500 sites was down by a third (33%) globally between Nov 2024 and Nov 2025 and by 38% in the United States, but it is not clear how much of this is down to AI overviews. reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk, read 4 November 2026.