SEO Statistics 2026: The Numbers Behind Google, AI Overviews and Clicks

I've been doing SEO on my own site since the days when you could rank a page by repeating a keyword in the footer. In 2026 the numbers that matter look nothing like they did even two years ago, so I pulled them together in one place. Some of them come from my own site and my own studies, with the method explained. The rest come from sources that don't sell anything, like Pew Research Center, the Reuters Institute and Wikipedia. Every number is named, dated and checked.

Last updated September 2026.

Key SEO statistics for 2026

• Google shows an AI Overview on 93% of the small business marketing searches I checked (280 of 300 live US searches, 10 September 2026). Source: my AI Overviews study.
• When a Google search shows an AI summary, people click a traditional result on 8% of visits, against 15% when there's no summary. Source: Pew Research Center, July 2025.
• People click a link inside the AI summary itself on just 1% of visits. Source: Pew Research Center.
• Google organic search traffic to more than 2,500 news sites fell by a third (33%) between November 2024 and November 2025, and by 38% in the United States. Source: Chartbeat data published by the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2026.
• Publishers expect traffic from search engines to fall by 43% over the next three years. Source: Reuters Institute.
• YouTube is cited in 57% of the AI Overviews I recorded and Reddit in 20%. Independent blogs appear in about 1%. Source: my AI Overviews study.
• 43% of the pages on my site that got zero impressions in 28 days were still in Google's index. Source: my zero-impression pages study.
• US searches for "google ai mode" rose from 201,000 a month in September 2025 to 450,000 in August 2026, while searches for "seo" fell from 135,000 to 60,500. Source: my DataForSEO pull of Google Ads search volumes, 29 September 2026.
• Google holds a 90% share of the global search engine market as of 2025. Source: Wikipedia.
• 34% of US adults have used ChatGPT, roughly double the share in 2023. Source: Pew Research Center, June 2025.

AI Overviews and AI summaries

The biggest change to SEO in the last two years is the answer that now sits above the results. In September 2026 I took the 300 searches that bring the most impressions to my site, fetched each live Google results page in the US and recorded everything on it. The full study is here, and these are the headline numbers:

• An AI Overview appeared on 280 of the 300 searches, which is 93%.
• Every Instagram question in the set (100%) had one. Free games questions had the fewest, at 77%.
• The AI Overview cited 5.4 sources on average.
• People Also Ask appeared on 91% of the searches, a video block on 38% and a forums and discussions box on 10%.

Pew Research Center looked at the same thing from the searcher's side. It tracked the browsing of 900 US adults in March 2025 across 68,879 unique Google searches, and published the results in July 2025:

• 18% of all the Google searches in the study produced an AI summary.
• 58% of the people in the study ran at least one search that produced an AI summary during the month.
• 88% of AI summaries cited three or more sources, and only 1% cited a single source.
• The typical AI summary was 67 words long. The shortest was seven words and the longest was 369.
• Only 8% of one or two word searches produced an AI summary, compared with 53% of searches of 10 words or more.
• 60% of searches that began with a question word such as who, what, when or why produced an AI summary.
• Wikipedia, YouTube and Reddit together made up 15% of the sources listed in AI summaries.

Put my study next to Pew's and the pattern is hard to miss. Short, head term searches still look like the old Google. Longer questions, which is exactly how people search for marketing help, are where the AI answer takes over.

Clicks and click-through rates

Rankings are only worth something if people click. This is where the numbers are hardest to read for anyone who learned SEO before 2024.

• Searchers who saw an AI summary clicked a traditional search result on 8% of visits. Those who didn't see one clicked nearly twice as often, on 15% of visits. Source: Pew Research Center.
• People ended their browsing session on 26% of search pages with an AI summary, compared with 16% of pages with only traditional results. Source: Pew Research Center.
• On my own site, pages ranking in positions 4 to 6 underneath an AI Overview earned a 0.7% click-through rate, and positions 7 to 10 earned 1.7%. Source: my AI Overviews study, Search Console data for the 28 days to 7 September 2026.
• Instagram questions, where every search had an AI Overview, clicked through at 0.44% on my site. Source: my AI Overviews study.

The honest takeaway for a small business: a page one ranking is no longer a traffic promise. The page has to be the source the AI quotes, or it has to answer a question the AI can't settle in two lines.

Search traffic to publishers

The Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2026, published on 16 June 2026, covers 48 markets. It's about news, but news sites are the canary for everyone who publishes content for search traffic.

• Google organic search traffic to more than 2,500 sites fell by 33% globally between November 2024 and November 2025, and by 38% in the United States (Chartbeat data reported by the Reuters Institute).
• Publishers expect traffic from search engines to almost halve, falling 43%, over the next three years.
• Search as the main gateway to news is unchanged for older audiences but down 3 percentage points among people under 35.
• 10% of people now use AI chatbots for news, up from 7% a year earlier.

How people search in 2026

I looked at every search that brought my site an impression in Google Search Console in the 28 days from 30 August to 26 September 2026, which came to 30,366 distinct searches.

• 47.7% of those searches were five words or longer.
• 28.8% started with a question word such as how, what, why, can or should.
• 54% of the Instagram searches that reach my site are questions. Source: my Instagram questions study.
• Searches mentioning AI tools (AI, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity or Copilot) grew from 2.6% of distinct searches in the 28 days to 29 August to 4.1% in the 28 days to 26 September 2026.
• 34% of US adults have used ChatGPT, including 58% of adults under 30. Source: Pew Research Center, June 2025.

Long searches and questions are the ones Pew found most likely to trigger an AI summary. That's the uncomfortable overlap: the way people naturally search for help is the way Google most often answers for them.

What people are searching for about SEO

I pulled US Google Ads search volumes for the main SEO terms through DataForSEO on 29 September 2026 and compared September 2025 with August 2026. Google Ads volumes are rounded into bands, so treat these as direction, not decimals.

• "google ai mode": 201,000 searches a month in September 2025, 450,000 in August 2026.
• "ai overviews": 60,500 a month in September 2025, 165,000 in August 2026.
• "seo": 135,000 a month in September 2025, 60,500 in August 2026.
• "local seo": 22,200 a month in September 2025, 3,600 in August 2026.
• "seo for small business": 6,600 a month in September 2025, 880 in August 2026.
• "generative engine optimization" averaged 4,400 searches a month and "answer engine optimization" 2,400.
• "what is seo" held at 27,100 searches a month at both ends of the year.

People haven't stopped caring about being found. They've started asking about the new places they're being found in.

Indexing and crawling

On 10 September 2026 I ran 1,995 pages from my own site that had earned zero impressions in 28 days through Google's URL Inspection tool. The full study is here.

• 43% of the zero-impression pages were indexed. Being in the index and being seen are not the same thing.
• 20% had been crawled and rejected (crawled, currently not indexed).
• 16% were unknown to Google, even though they were in the sitemap and linked internally.
• 18% were pages I had set to noindex on purpose.
• The median page had last been crawled 47 days earlier, and a quarter hadn't been crawled in 118 days or more.

Google and the history of SEO

• Google Search has a 90% share of the global search engine market as of 2025, according to Wikipedia.
• By 2012 Google handled more than 3.5 billion searches per day. Source: Wikipedia.
• Website owners started optimising for search engines in the mid 1990s, and the phrase "search engine optimization" came into use in 1997. Source: Wikipedia.

What these SEO statistics mean for your business

If you run a small business, here's how I'd read all of this. Rankings still matter, because the AI answer pulls from pages that rank, but a ranking on its own is worth less every month. Write the answer in the first paragraph so it can be lifted. Put your best how-to content on video too, because YouTube is the source Google's AI reaches for most. And build pages that do a job an AI answer can't: tools, templates, lists people use and original data like the numbers on this page.

If you want more numbers like these, my research hub has every study I've published, and my AI search statistics page goes deeper on AI search.

Methodology

This page mixes two kinds of statistic. The first is my own data from lilachbullock.com: Google Search Console exports for the 28 days from 30 August to 26 September 2026, compared with the 28 days before; my AI Overviews study (300 live US desktop Google results pages fetched on 10 September 2026 and joined to Search Console data for the 28 days to 7 September 2026); my zero-impression pages study (1,995 URLs checked with the URL Inspection API on 10 September 2026); and a DataForSEO pull of US Google Ads search volumes on 29 September 2026. My data comes from one site, so it shows what's happening to a real business rather than a market average.

The second kind is published third-party research from organisations that don't sell SEO: Pew Research Center, the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford, and Wikipedia. I checked each number against the live source on 29 September 2026 and left out anything I couldn't confirm. I haven't estimated or rounded anyone else's numbers.

Frequently asked questions

What percentage of Google searches show an AI Overview in 2026?

It depends heavily on the type of search. Pew Research Center found that 18% of all Google searches in its March 2025 study produced an AI summary. On the 300 small business marketing searches I checked in September 2026, 93% showed an AI Overview. Question searches and longer searches are far more likely to get one.

Do AI Overviews reduce clicks to websites?

Yes, on the data available. Pew found that people clicked a traditional search result on 8% of visits when an AI summary appeared, compared with 15% when it didn't. On my own site, pages in positions 4 to 6 under an AI Overview earned a 0.7% click-through rate.

Is SEO still worth it in 2026?

Yes, but the goal has changed. AI answers are built from pages that rank, and 88% of Google's AI summaries cite three or more sources. The aim now is to be one of those sources, and to build pages that do something an AI answer can't, like a tool, a template or original data.

How much has search traffic dropped for publishers?

Chartbeat data reported by the Reuters Institute shows Google organic search traffic to more than 2,500 sites fell by 33% globally between November 2024 and November 2025, and by 38% in the United States. Publishers expect a further 43% drop over the next three years.

Which websites do Google AI Overviews cite most?

In my study of 300 searches, YouTube was cited in 57% of AI Overviews and Reddit in 20%, while independent blogs appeared in about 1%. Pew found Wikipedia, YouTube and Reddit made up 15% of all sources in the AI summaries it studied.