AI SEO Statistics (2026): Key Insights & Trends Every Marketer Should Know

Nearly 85.7% are already investing in AI optimization, and 61% expect to spend more on SEO because of AI. 

87.76% of businesses are worried about the future of SEO because of the domination of AI answers in search results.

Over 75% of marketers are optimizing their content to get citations in AI tools for their brands and businesses. 

In this post, let’s explore some of the most interesting AI SEO statistics everyone should know.

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How Many SEOs Are Using AI? (AI SEO Adoption)

2.5% of the content is created with the help of AI assistance, 25.8% is created solely by SEOs, and 71.7% is produced by humans + AI.

Here’s a table showing the number of web pages created or assisted with different levels of AI usage.

Category	% of Pages
Pure Human	25.8%
Very little AI Use	9.87%
Good amount of AI Use	46.36%
Mostly relying on AI	15.51%
Pure AI	2.5%
Human + AI (Total)	71.7%

87.1% of SEOs use AI for creating blog posts, making blogs the top type of AI-made content in 2025.

Here’s a table showing the most common types of content created using AI.

Content Type	% Using AI
Blog posts	87.1%
Website copy	63.7%
Social media posts	62.7%
Email/newsletters	47.2%
Ad copy	34.3%
Video scripts	28.8%
eBooks	16.9%
Whitepapers	15.2%
Other	7.1%

75.7% of SEOs use AI tools primarily for brainstorming topic ideas for their blogs and websites.

Here’s a table showing the most common AI-assisted tasks used by the majority of SEOs.

AI-Assisted Task	Percentage
Brainstorming topic ideas	75.7%
Creating content outlines	73.2%
Improving content	66.6%
Editing/rewriting content	62.5%
Crafting/optimizing headlines	52.8%
Creating content from scratch	43.8%
Keyword clustering	22.8%

Sources: Ahrefs, Ahrefs   

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General AI In SEO Stats

84% of marketers now use AI to match their content with what people are actually searching for, helping them create more relevant and engaging SEO content.

Source: Statista

80% of consumers now rely on AI-written search results for around 40% of their online questions.

Source: Marketing Week

How do most people like to call “AI visibility optimization?”

48.98% of marketers prefer the term “SEO for AI optimization”.

40.82% of people prefer calling it “GEO”, 8.16% of them like to refer to it as “SEO for LLMs”, and only 6.12% of them refer to it as “AEO”.

Sources: Smarty Marketing

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AI impact on SEO performance

AI Overviews have led to decreases of 18% to 64% in organic traffic across industries, depending on the type of search and topic.

86% of SEO experts now use AI in their work, and 65% say AI tools help them get better SEO results.

67% notice better content quality with AI, and 68% get a better ROI from content marketing because of AI.

Sources: Search Engine Land, SEOprofy, Semrush, Saffron Edge

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AI Click-Through Rate (CTR) Insights

After Google introduced AI overviews, the click rate for the top organic search result dropped 32% (from 28% to 19%), and the click rate for the second spot dropped 39% (from 20.83% to 12.6%).

63% of businesses say AI features have improved their organic traffic. AI-driven authority leads to 43% more top-three rankings and helps pages rank 71.5% faster.

Source: GrowthSRC

AI Overviews (Google’s AI-powered snippets) have led to a 61% decline in organic clicks for informational searches since mid-2024.

Organic CTRs on AI Overview searches fell from 1.76% to 0.61%, and paid CTRs dropped from 19.7% to 6.34%. Even non-AI Overview queries do better at 1.62%, but that’s still down 41% YoY.

Source: Search Engine Land

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AI SEO trends

82% of desktop and 76% of mobile AI Overviews came from keywords with less than 1,000 monthly searches.

80% of desktop and 76% of mobile AI Overviews were shown for informational keywords, not buying or brand searches.

Only 5% of search pages with AI Overviews also showed Google Ads.

On average (across desktop and mobile SERPs), an AI Overview had 11 links, but only 20–26% of those links matched the top 10 organic results.

Over 80% of mobile AI Overviews showed 3 or fewer links from Google’s top 10 results, usually just one matching link. Over 88% of desktop AI Overviews showed 4 or fewer links, usually 3 matching links.

Most questions that trigger AI Overviews start with “how,” “what,” or “is.”

“How” questions are the top trigger for AI Overviews, accounting for approximately 36% of all cases on both desktop (35.7%) and mobile (36.3%).

Here’s a table showing question keywords that trigger AI Overviews on desktop and mobile.

Question Keyword	Desktop (%)	Mobile (%)
How	35.7%	36.3%
What	23.9%	19.7%
Is	11.2%	11.6%
Do	7.5%	8.7%
Can	6.5%	7.4%
Are	3%	3.2%
Does	2.9%	3%
Why	2.9%	2.9%
When	2%	2.3%

Source: Semrush

Bing now handles over 100 million searches daily. Here are some of the latest Bing stats every marketer should know. 

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Google’s AI Overviews

Google’s AI Overviews now appear in nearly 60% of all search results. Just a year ago, that figure was 25%. 

When an AI Overview appears, click-through rates have gone down by about 34.5% on average for organic results.

According to an Ahrefs study of 300,000 keywords, the top result was expected to have a CTR of 0.040 in March 2025, but it actually achieved only 0.026. That’s a reduction of 0.014 or about 34.5%, showing AI overviews reduced clicks on top results.

Google’s AI Overviews are used by approximately 2 billion people every month across more than 200 countries and territories, in 40 languages. Its AI Mode has around 100 million users in the US and India.

Sources: Advanced Web Ranking, Ahrefs, Inside Google

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AI citation insights

74.2% of all new pages on the internet now contain AI-generated content. 

Wikipedia dominates all three AI assistants, but ChatGPT cites it the most (16.3%), followed by Perplexity (12.5%) and AI Overviews (8.4%).

Reddit and Quora rank high only in AI Overviews (7.4% and 3.6%). They don’t appear in the top 10 for ChatGPT or Perplexity, showing Google prefers user-generated content sites.

Top health sites, such as the Mayo Clinic and Cleveland Clinic, appear in AI results, but not in the top 10 for ChatGPT or Perplexity.

Sources: Ahrefs, Ahrefs

How fast is blogging growing today? Here are some of the latest blogging statistics breakdown.

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AI content and rankings

AI content doesn’t hurt your Google rankings. In fact, about 86.5% of the top 20 results include at least some AI-generated content.

Another surprising fact is that content entirely generated by AI tools never reaches the #1 position in Google search results. 

Only 26% of new web content is entirely created by humans, and just half of that (13.5%) ranks in top positions on Google.

Sources: Ahrefs

Did you know that 17% of people spend between $5,000 and $10,000 per month, and 10% say they spend between $10,000 and $20,000? Here are some of the latest content marketing stats to know.

AI content adoption

The average AI Overview is 119 words long on desktop and 91 words on mobile.

87.35% of creators utilize AI tools for content creation. Only 12.63% of people do not rely on AI tools for content creation.

People who use AI tools publish 42% more content per month than those who don’t. Companies using AI published an average of 17 articles per month, while those not using AI published 12, about 42% fewer.

Sources: Semrush, Ahrefs

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AI Search Vs Google Search

Will AI search replace traditional Google search? The answer for now is a big no. This is because Google still handles far more searches, roughly 373 times more than ChatGPT in the recent period.

Here are some fascinating stats that show the size gap between traditional search and AI search.

ChatGPT handles approximately 66.5 million search prompts daily, while Google manages 14 billion, making Google roughly 210 times larger in terms of searches. 

Here is a table comparing search volumes across AI platforms and Google.

Platform	Daily Searches	Monthly Visits	Market Share
Google	14 billion	83.9 billion	90%+ (global)
ChatGPT	66.5 million	2 billion	~10% (AI search)
Perplexity	30 million	780 million	6.6% (AI search)

Curious how big Google Search really is? This Google search statistics report breaks down the latest numbers.

Traditional keyword searches average about 4 words, while AI-style conversational queries average around 23 words.

Around 40% of Gen Z now prefers using AI-powered search platforms, choosing them over traditional search engines.

Wix data shows that AI search platforms, including ChatGPT, DeepSeek, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, Grok, and Claude, now receive a combined 7.5 billion visits.

Sources: Search Engine Land, Wix, Tenet, Oceanside Analytics

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Conclusion

AI SEO is changing the SEO game, as instant answers are showing up for most users’ queries. 

Clicks to websites are going down drastically because 60% of searches are now completed without clicks due to AI Overviews.

AI-powered content can help businesses get up to 45% more organic traffic and boost conversions by 38%.

That’s why tracking your visibility in AI search is essential to staying ahead of the competition.

What are your thoughts on the AI stats mentioned above? Are you tracking your AI results? Have any questions? Let us know in the comments. 

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FAQs | AI SEO Stats

Here are some frequently asked questions about AI SEO stats.