AI Search Statistics 2026: Clicks, Citations and the Sites ChatGPT, Gemini and Google Cite Most
Updated October 29, 2026. Every figure in this article was checked against the original publication; the methodology is at the end.
Key takeaways:
Google reports more than 2.5 billion monthly users for AI Overviews, and 52% of Quebec internet users have already used a generative AI tool (Google and NETendances, 2026).
When Google shows an AI Overview, the top organic result gets about 58% fewer clicks than expected (Ahrefs, 2026).
Nearly 69% of Google searches end without a single click, up from 56% a year earlier (Similarweb, 2025).
Reddit is the most-cited source for ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI Mode; YouTube leads AI Overviews; Copilot cites Amazon first (Ahrefs, September 2026).
Web brand mentions are about three times more correlated with AI visibility than backlinks (Ahrefs, 2025).
llms.txt files and Schema markup have no measurable effect on AI citations (Ahrefs and SE Ranking, 2025-2026).
For two years now, we've heard every possible take on AI search. SEO is dead. Just add an llms.txt file. Google penalizes anything written with ChatGPT. Before changing anything on a website, we'd rather look at the numbers. This article brings together the strongest data published in 2025 and 2026 by Google, Statistics Canada, Université Laval, Ahrefs, Seer Interactive, Pew Research, Semrush, Similarweb, Amsive, SE Ranking, Carnegie Mellon and Princeton, and what it means in practice for a business that relies on Google to find customers.
Key AI and search statistics for 2026
AI usage
Statistic | Source | Date |
|---|---|---|
Google's AI Overviews have more than 2.5 billion monthly users, and AI Mode has more than 1 billion. | May 2026 | |
The Gemini app has passed 1 billion monthly active users. | October 2026 | |
OpenAI announced that ChatGPT has 1.2 billion weekly users. | September 2026 | |
An AI Overview appears on about 43% of Google searches, up from about 15% a year earlier. | July 2026 | |
52% of Quebec internet users have used a generative AI tool, up 19 points in a year. | March 2026 | |
Among Quebec generative AI users, 84% use ChatGPT, 29% Copilot and 22% Gemini; 54% use it at least once a week. | March 2026 | |
19.2% of Canadian businesses used AI to produce goods or deliver services in the past 12 months, up from 12.2% a year earlier. | June 2026 | |
25.2% of Canadian businesses plan to use AI in the next 12 months. | October 2026 |
Clicks and zero-click searches
Statistic | Source | Date |
|---|---|---|
The top organic result gets 58% fewer clicks than expected when an AI Overview is shown (desktop data, 300,000 keywords). | February 2026 | |
Ahrefs' first measurement of the same question found 34.5% fewer clicks. | April 2025 | |
In a field experiment with 1,065 Chrome users, AI Overviews cut organic clicks by 38%. | April 2026 | |
With an AI summary, users click a traditional link on 8% of visits, versus 15% without one. | July 2025 | |
Links inside the AI summary itself are clicked on just 1% of visits. | July 2025 | |
58% of participants saw at least one AI summary in a month, and 18% of the searches studied showed one. | July 2025 | |
The share of Google searches ending without any click rose from 56% to 69% between May 2024 and May 2025. | July 2025 | |
On informational queries with an AI Overview, organic CTR fell from 1.76% to 0.61% (-61%). | November 2025 | |
Even without an AI Overview, organic CTR on those queries fell 41% (2.74% to 1.62%). | November 2025 | |
Paid ad CTR on those queries dropped 68% when an AI Overview appeared (19.70% to 6.34%). | November 2025 | |
Branded queries gain 18.7% in CTR with an AI Overview, while non-branded queries lose about 20%. | April 2025 | |
In France, nine days after AI Overviews launched, median CTR for highly exposed sites fell 23.1%. | September 2026 |
AI sources and citations
Statistic | Source | Date |
|---|---|---|
Reddit is the site ChatGPT cites most, with 16.8% of citations among the top 50 cited domains. | September 2026 | |
YouTube is the most-cited site in Google's AI Overviews (22.9%), ahead of Reddit (18.5%). | September 2026 | |
Reddit captures 28.5% of Gemini's citations among the top 50 cited domains. | September 2026 | |
In Perplexity, Reddit (21.6%) and YouTube (20.8%) are nearly tied. | September 2026 | |
In Google's AI Mode, Reddit (17.9%), YouTube (17.8%) and google.com (12.5%) make up the top three. | September 2026 | |
Copilot cites retail sites first: Amazon (16.8%) and Walmart (12.6%). | September 2026 | |
Only 37.9% of pages cited in AI Overviews rank in Google's top 10; 31% rank beyond position 100. | March 2026 | |
Wikipedia makes up 29.7% of the 1,000 pages ChatGPT cites most, and only 32.3% of those pages can realistically be influenced by a brand. | October 2025 | |
For factual questions, 63.4% of ChatGPT's citations point to official websites, versus 46.4% for comparison questions. | October 2026 | |
Web brand mentions have a 0.664 correlation with AI Overview visibility, versus 0.218 for backlinks. | May 2025 | |
YouTube mentions are the signal most correlated with visibility in ChatGPT, AI Mode and AI Overviews (about 0.737). | December 2025 | |
Pages cited by AI assistants average 1,064 days old, versus 1,432 days in organic results, making them 25.7% fresher. | July 2025 |
Content, technical and conversion
Statistic | Source | Date |
|---|---|---|
Of 600,000 ranking pages, 4.6% are fully AI-generated and 81.9% are mixed; the correlation between AI content and ranking is 0.011, effectively zero. | July 2025 | |
A page in position 1 has an 80.5% probability of being human-written, versus 10% for AI-generated text (42,000 blog posts). | April 2026 | |
97% of llms.txt files received zero requests in May 2026 (137,210 domains analyzed). | June 2026 | |
No measurable link between having an llms.txt file and being cited by AI (about 300,000 domains). | November 2025 | |
Adding Schema markup produced no significant increase in citations in ChatGPT (+2.2%) or AI Mode (+2.4%). | May 2026 | |
Certain content changes (quotes, statistics, sources) raise visibility in AI answers by up to 40%. | 2024 | |
Citing external sources raises visibility by 115.1% for a site ranked 5th. | 2024 | |
At Ahrefs, AI search made up 0.5% of visits but 12.1% of signups, a conversion rate 23 times higher than organic search. | June 2025 |
How many people use AI to search for information?
AI is no longer a niche habit. Google says its AI Overviews reach more than 2.5 billion users a month and that AI Mode has more than 1 billion (May 2026). The Gemini app passed 1 billion monthly users in October 2026, and OpenAI announced 1.2 billion weekly users for ChatGPT in September 2026. According to Similarweb data reported by TechCrunch, an AI Overview now appears on about 43% of Google searches, up from about 15% a year earlier.
Quebec is on the same curve. According to the NETendances survey by the Académie de la transformation numérique (Université Laval), 52% of Quebec internet users have used a generative AI tool, 19 points more than a year before. ChatGPT dominates: 84% of Quebec users rely on it, well ahead of Copilot (29%) and Gemini (22%). On the business side, Statistics Canada reports that 19.2% of Canadian businesses used AI to produce goods or deliver services in Q2 2026, up from 12.2% a year earlier. For a closer look at Quebec, see our article on AI in Quebec and the 2025 figures.
Do AI Overviews really reduce clicks?
Yes, and it's the strongest finding across all the studies. When Google shows an AI summary (AI Overview) at the top of the results, people click less on the links below it.
Ahrefs has tracked this since spring 2025. Its first analysis measured a 34.5% drop in clicks on the top organic result. Its February 2026 update compares 300,000 keywords between December 2023 and December 2025: with an AI Overview, the top result's CTR falls to 1.6%, against an expected 3.7% without one. That's about 58% fewer clicks. Ahrefs notes that the analysis covers desktop only and shows a correlation, since other parts of the results page can play a role too.
France is a useful case for us because it's a French-language market. After AI Overviews launched there on July 22, 2026, Ahrefs analyzed Search Console data from 963 domains. Within nine days, overall CTR fell 3.4%. For highly exposed sites (where more than 20% of queries trigger an AI summary), median CTR dropped 23.1%, from 2.29% to 1.76%.
These numbers don't come from a single SEO tool vendor. Other teams reach the same conclusion with different methods:
ISB and Carnegie Mellon ran a field experiment with 1,065 Chrome users in the U.S. With an AI Overview present, organic clicks fell 38%. The study is a working paper that hasn't been peer-reviewed yet.
Pew Research analyzed 68,879 Google searches by 900 U.S. adults in March 2025. With an AI summary on screen, people clicked a traditional link 8% of the time, versus 15% without one, and clicked a link inside the summary itself just 1% of the time. They ended their browsing on the results page 26% of the time, versus 16% without a summary.
According to Similarweb, the share of Google searches that end without any click rose from 56% to 69% between May 2024 and May 2025, the first full year of AI Overviews.
Search intent changes everything
Not every query is hit the same way. Seer Interactive tracked 3,119 informational queries across 42 clients from June 2024 to September 2025. When an AI Overview appears, organic CTR on these "how to" and "what is" queries falls from 1.76% to 0.61%, a 61% drop. Paid ads aren't spared either: their CTR falls 68%.
The most telling detail: even without an AI summary, those queries lost 41% of their clicks over the same period. People have gotten used to reading the answer right in Google. They no longer click out of habit.
On the other hand, the agency Amsive measured an 18.7% CTR increase on roughly 700,000 keywords for branded queries (when someone searches for your company name) when an AI Overview appears. Non-branded queries dropped about 20%. The summary adds context and credibility, and sends people to the official site.
Which sites does AI cite most?
Every month, Ahrefs publishes a ranking of the 50 sites each AI engine cites most, based on its Brand Radar tool. The September 2026 data covers millions of U.S. queries across all topics. A site's "mention share" is its share of citations among those 50 sites, not among all citations on the web.
The main finding: every engine has its favourite sources.
Reddit is the #1 source for ChatGPT (16.8%), Gemini (28.5%), Perplexity (21.6%) and Google's AI Mode (17.9%).
YouTube leads AI Overviews (22.9%) and ranks second in AI Mode (17.8%), Gemini (14.6%) and Perplexity (20.8%).
Copilot stands apart: it cites retail sites first, Amazon (16.8%) and Walmart (12.6%).
Facebook accounts for about 10% of citations in AI Mode and AI Overviews, and Wikipedia appears in all six rankings.
AI engine | Most cited site | Mention share | Second site |
|---|---|---|---|
AI Overviews | youtube.com | 22.9% | reddit.com (18.5%) |
Google AI Mode | reddit.com | 17.9% | youtube.com (17.8%) |
ChatGPT | reddit.com | 16.8% | en.wikipedia.org (7.0%) |
Gemini | reddit.com | 28.5% | youtube.com (14.6%) |
Perplexity | reddit.com | 21.6% | youtube.com (20.8%) |
Copilot | amazon.com | 16.8% | walmart.com (12.6%) |
Three nuances change how to read these rankings:
Being #1 doesn't mean being stable. Ahrefs observes that Reddit citations in ChatGPT answers fell 88% between March and September 2026, even though Reddit still tops the ranking.
Your official website matters. For factual questions, 63.4% of ChatGPT's citations go to official websites, versus 46.4% for comparison questions.
Google's top 10 is no longer enough. Only 37.9% of pages cited in AI Overviews rank in Google's top 10; 31% rank beyond position 100.
In practice, betting on a single channel leaves entire engines out. This data covers the U.S. market: it shows the broad trends, not the exact ranking in Quebec.
Does Google penalize AI-written content?
No. Ahrefs analyzed 600,000 pages: the top 20 results for 100,000 randomly selected keywords. The result: 4.6% of those pages were written entirely by AI, 13.5% entirely by humans and 81.9% were a mix. The correlation between the share of AI-generated text and Google ranking was 0.011, which is to say none.
Semrush adds nuance with 42,000 blog posts ranking in the top 10, analyzed with the GPTZero detector: in position 1, a page has an 80.5% probability of being human-written, versus 10% for AI-generated text. The gap then narrows between positions 5 and 10.
In other words, using AI to write isn't the issue. Publishing something anyone could have produced with the same tool is. Winning content brings original data, real experience or an expert point of view.
Do llms.txt and Schema markup help you get cited by AI?
The data says no. When traffic drops, it's tempting to look for a shortcut. Three tactics got a lot of attention.
The llms.txt file
Proposed in late 2024 as a robots.txt-style file to guide language models, llms.txt does next to nothing for your AI visibility.
Of 137,210 domains analyzed by Ahrefs, about 38,000 (28%) had an llms.txt file. Of those, 97% received zero requests in May 2026.
SE Ranking studied about 300,000 domains and found no measurable link between having the file and being cited by AI.
AI crawlers read your pages' HTML. They don't go looking for a separate instructions file.
Schema markup (JSON-LD)
Ahrefs tracked 1,885 pages that added structured data, comparing them with control pages over the same period. The result: +2.2% citations in ChatGPT and +2.4% in Google's AI Mode, neither statistically significant. In AI Overviews, citations actually fell 4.6%, though Ahrefs couldn't say the markup caused it.
Schema markup is still worth having: it helps search engines understand a page and powers rich results in Google. Just don't pitch it as a way to get cited by AI.
Forced self-promotion
The third false good idea: publishing your own list of the "best" vendors with yourself at the top. Lily Ray tracked 100 B2B queries in AI Overviews: in 69% of cases (224 of 323), a self-promotional listicle was cited as a source, but the brand that published it wasn't recommended in the answer. AI uses your page to recommend your competitors.
How do you get cited by ChatGPT, Gemini and AI Overviews?
The term now is GEO, for Generative Engine Optimization: optimizing content so a generative engine picks it up and cites it. Two levers stand out in the data, one on your site and one off it.
On your site: facts, sources and a clear structure
The reference study on GEO comes from researchers at Princeton, Georgia Tech and IIT Delhi, presented at the ACM KDD conference in 2024. It tested nine ways of rewriting a text and shows that some raise visibility in AI answers by up to 40%. The most effective ones:
Adding expert quotes. A statement attributed to a real person carries more weight than an anonymous claim.
Adding statistics and hard data, with their source.
Citing credible external sources. The effect is dramatic for lower-ranked pages (+115.1% for a site in 5th position), but it can hurt pages already at the top (-30.3% on average for the first result).
Keyword stuffing, on the other hand, adds nothing. Give the answer early on the page, with a clear heading hierarchy (H1, H2, H3) and tables that are easy to extract.
Off your site: mentions matter more than links
This is the most surprising finding in Ahrefs' research. In a study of 75,000 brands, web brand mentions showed a 0.664 correlation with visibility in AI Overviews. Traditional backlinks? Just 0.218, about three times lower. A more recent Ahrefs study covering ChatGPT, AI Mode and AI Overviews puts YouTube mentions ahead of every other signal, with a correlation of about 0.74.
Signal | Correlation with AI visibility (Ahrefs) |
|---|---|
YouTube mentions | ≈ 0.74 |
Web brand mentions | 0.664 |
Traditional backlinks | 0.218 |
One caution: correlation isn't causation. Big brands have both lots of mentions and lots of visibility. But the direction is clear: AI leans on what others say about you, not just on what you say about yourself.
Few visits, but visits that convert
Traffic from AI assistants is still small. At Ahrefs, over a 30-day window, it made up 0.5% of visits. Yet those visitors generated 12.1% of all new signups, a conversion rate 23 times higher than traditional organic search. That's one site's measurement, but it matches what we see: these people often arrive with their decision mostly made and a short list of vendors in mind.
What needs to change in your strategy
Before getting to execution, here are the shifts this data calls for, from the easiest to the most structural.
Measure your exposure
Split your organic traffic into informational, transactional and branded queries. If a large share of your visits depends on "how to" articles, plan for a significant drop in that segment in your forecasts. Better to see it coming than to discover it in Google Analytics.
Shift your content toward the bottom of the funnel
Cut back on generic guides that AI summarizes perfectly well on its own. Put the effort into what a customer reads right before buying: comparisons, detailed service pages, case studies, testimonials, pricing.
Aim for citation on your informational pages
Your best informational articles are still worth keeping. The goal changes: become the source cited in the AI summary. According to Seer Interactive, brands cited in an AI Overview get a 0.70% organic CTR, versus 0.52% for brands that aren't (+35%), and a 7.89% paid CTR versus 4.14% (+91%). Seer notes that citation may reflect an already strong brand rather than cause those clicks, but the gap is clear.
Build your off-site presence
Invest in the places AI already listens to: a YouTube channel with real demonstrations, digital PR, and genuine participation in your industry's communities. Every credible mention of your brand counts. The detailed plan below shows how to do it, platform by platform.
Produce what AI can't make up
Proprietary data, first-hand experience, well-argued opinions, interactive tools: anything a model can't rebuild from what's already online. Make the experts behind your content clearly identifiable.
Keep your pages up to date
AI assistants cite fresher content than traditional organic results do. According to an Ahrefs analysis of 17 million citations, the average age of cited pages is 1,064 days, versus 1,432 days in Google's results, making them 25.7% fresher. So the right move isn't to publish more and more, it's to regularly update your strongest pages: figures, examples, review date.
Change your metrics
Average position in Google tells less and less of the story. Add three measures: your share of voice in AI answers to the key questions in your market, the trend in CTR on your branded queries, and AI crawler traffic in your server logs.
The JB Impact action plan: get cited where AI finds its answers
Good news for local businesses: most of them live mainly on local, transactional and branded searches, exactly the ones AI affects least. So the challenge isn't saving blog traffic, it's showing up in the sources AI engines rely on. Here's the plan we can put in place for your business, in the order we roll it out.
Step 1: the AI visibility diagnostic
We list the 20 to 30 questions your customers ask before buying, then put them to ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, AI Mode and AI Overviews. For each answer, we note whether your business is cited, who is cited instead and which sources keep coming back. You come away with your starting share of voice and a map of the sources to win, engine by engine.
Step 2: your official website and Google and Microsoft properties
For factual questions, ChatGPT cites official websites 63.4% of the time, so we make sure your site clearly answers the questions from the diagnostic. Google also cites itself a lot: google.com accounts for 12.5% of AI Mode mentions and 8.8% of AI Overviews mentions. We complete and keep your Google Business Profile active: services, service areas, photos, posts and review replies. Finally, 29% of Quebec generative AI users rely on Copilot, which draws on the Microsoft ecosystem, so we set up Bing Places and Bing Webmaster Tools.
Engines targeted: ChatGPT, AI Mode, AI Overviews, Copilot.
Step 3: YouTube
YouTube is the #1 source for AI Overviews (22.9%) and #2 for AI Mode, Gemini and Perplexity. We produce a series of short videos that answer the questions from the diagnostic, with a real person on camera, clear titles, chapters and full transcripts AI can read.
Engines targeted: AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity.
Step 4: Facebook, Instagram and TikTok
Facebook accounts for about 10% of mentions in AI Mode and AI Overviews, Instagram over 5% and TikTok close to 3%. We set up a regular posting calendar with public, useful content rather than purely promotional posts: tips, behind the scenes, answers to common questions.
Engines targeted: AI Mode, AI Overviews, Perplexity.
Step 5: Reddit and Quora
Reddit is the #1 source for ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and AI Mode. Quora also shows up in AI Mode and AI Overviews. We monitor discussions in your industry and region (r/Quebec, r/QuebecCity, specialized communities) and answer in a useful, transparent way, clearly identified as your business. No disguised advertising: members and moderators spot it quickly, and it hurts the brand.
Engines targeted: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, AI Mode, AI Overviews.
Step 6: marketplaces, if you sell products
Copilot cites Amazon (16.8%) and Walmart (12.6%) first, ahead of Wikipedia. If you sell online, we create or improve your listings on these marketplaces, consistent with your Wix or Shopify store: same product names, same specifications, complete descriptions.
Engines targeted: Copilot, AI Mode, AI Overviews.
Step 7: editorial authority
Wikipedia appears in all six rankings, but a small business can't create a promotional page there: the encyclopedia requires notability backed by independent sources. What we build is exactly those sources: coverage in regional media, professional associations, chambers of commerce and industry directories. Each one also strengthens brand mentions, the signal most correlated with AI visibility.
Engines targeted: all of them.
Step 8: monthly measurement
Every month, we put the same questions to the same engines to track your share of voice. We add the CTR of your branded queries in Search Console and the traffic coming from ChatGPT, Perplexity or Copilot in Google Analytics. You see what's improving, and we adjust the plan accordingly.
The first two steps go quickly. The rest takes hold over time, because brand mentions build up over several months. To go further, our strategic plan for answer engine optimization (AEO) walks through the approach, and an SEO audit is a good way to take stock of your site.
Want to know where your brand stands in AI search? Book a free consultation: we'll go through your data with you and tell you where to start.
Frequently asked questions about AI search
How many people use ChatGPT and generative AI?
OpenAI announced 1.2 billion weekly users for ChatGPT in September 2026. Google reports more than 2.5 billion monthly users for AI Overviews, more than 1 billion for AI Mode and more than 1 billion for the Gemini app.
What share of Quebecers use generative AI?
52% of Quebec internet users have used a generative AI tool, according to the NETendances survey by the Académie de la transformation numérique (Université Laval), published in March 2026. Among them, 84% use ChatGPT and 54% use generative AI at least once a week.
What percentage of Google searches end without a click?
About 69%. According to Similarweb, the share of Google searches ending without any click rose from 56% to 69% between May 2024 and May 2025, the first full year of AI Overviews.
How much do AI Overviews reduce clicks?
According to Ahrefs, the top organic result gets about 58% fewer clicks than expected when an AI Overview is shown (February 2026). A field experiment by ISB and Carnegie Mellon measured a 38% drop in organic clicks, and Pew Research found an 8% click rate with a summary versus 15% without.
Which sites does ChatGPT cite most?
In September 2026, the sites ChatGPT cited most in the U.S. were reddit.com (16.8% of citations among the top 50 sites), en.wikipedia.org (7.0%), consumerreports.org (3.7%) and forbes.com (3.1%), according to Ahrefs Brand Radar.
What are the most-cited sources across AI engines?
Reddit is the #1 source for ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI Mode. YouTube is the #1 source for AI Overviews (22.9%) and Amazon for Copilot (16.8%). Wikipedia appears in the rankings of all six engines (Ahrefs, September 2026).
Does Google penalize AI-generated content?
No. Across 600,000 pages analyzed by Ahrefs, the correlation between AI content share and Google ranking is 0.011, effectively zero. Semrush does find that pages in position 1 are far more often human-written (80.5% versus 10%).
Does llms.txt improve AI visibility?
No. Ahrefs found that 97% of llms.txt files received zero requests in May 2026, and SE Ranking found no link between the file and AI citations across about 300,000 domains.
Does Schema markup help you get cited by AI?
Not measurably. In Ahrefs' study of 1,885 pages, adding structured data produced no significant increase in citations in ChatGPT or Google's AI Mode. Schema is still useful for rich results and for helping search engines understand pages.
What is GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)?
GEO means optimizing content so a generative AI engine picks it up and cites it in its answers. The foundational study by Princeton, Georgia Tech and IIT Delhi (2024) shows that adding quotes, statistics and sources can raise that visibility by up to 40%.
How do you get your business cited by ChatGPT?
Answer your customers' questions clearly on your official website, earn credible mentions of your brand elsewhere on the web (media, YouTube, communities like Reddit) and back your content with data and sources. Brand mentions are about three times more correlated with AI visibility than backlinks.
Does AI search traffic convert better?
For Ahrefs, yes: AI search made up 0.5% of visits but 12.1% of signups, a conversion rate 23 times higher than organic search. That's one site's measurement; results vary by industry.
Methodology and sources
For this article, every statistic was checked against the original publication, not an article that repeats it. Two exceptions are flagged as such: ChatGPT's user count, announced by OpenAI and reported by The Verge, and the share of searches showing an AI Overview, from a Similarweb report covered by TechCrunch. When a study has limits (data from a single site, a paper not yet peer-reviewed, correlation rather than causation), we say so in the text. The Ahrefs Brand Radar rankings cover U.S. queries from September 2026; mention share is calculated among the 50 domains each engine cites most. Several of these sources are updated monthly: the figures may change, and this article will be revised accordingly.
Google, Sundar Pichai's Google I/O 2026 keynote and Alphabet Q3 2026 earnings remarks
The Verge, ChatGPT now has 1.2 billion weekly users
TechCrunch, Google's AI search is rapidly becoming the default (Similarweb data)
Université Laval, NETendances 2025: generative artificial intelligence
Statistics Canada, business use of AI, Q2 2026 and Q3 2026
Ahrefs, AI Overviews impact in France
Agarwal and Sen (ISB and Carnegie Mellon), reported by Search Engine Journal
Pew Research Center, Google users are less likely to click when an AI summary appears
Similarweb, reported by Search Engine Roundtable
Seer Interactive, AI Overviews impact on CTR (September 2025)
Amsive, Google AI Overviews: branded vs. non-branded queries
Ahrefs Brand Radar, the 50 most-cited websites (September 2026): ChatGPT, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot
Ahrefs, ChatGPT's 1,000 most-cited pages
Ahrefs, how ChatGPT does query fan-out
Ahrefs, brand mentions and AI Overviews and AI brand visibility correlations
Semrush, Does AI content rank in search?
Ahrefs, llms.txt study and Search Engine Journal on the SE Ranking study
Ahrefs, Schema and AI citations
Aggarwal et al., GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, ACM KDD 2024
Ahrefs, AI search traffic conversions
About the author
Jessy Bédard is a full-stack marketer at JB Impact, a web marketing agency based in Quebec City. A Wix Legend Expert (among the top 1% of Wix experts worldwide, with more than 350 sites built) and a certified Google Ads Partner, he has helped Quebec small businesses with SEO, GEO and online advertising for more than 20 years.
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