SEO statistics 2026: 100+ stats checked at the source

These SEO statistics for 2026 come straight from the organizations that ran the research, from Google and StatCounter to Pew Research Center, Ahrefs, Semrush, SparkToro and BrightLocal, each with its date, its method and a link to the original study.

How much organic traffic is left when an AI Overview answers the question first, and which SEO stats can you still trust?

In this guide, you’ll learn:

• the latest search engine, CTR and zero-click statistics, with the method behind each one
• what AI Overviews, AI Mode and ChatGPT are doing to clicks and citations
• content, backlink, technical and local SEO stats you can use in a plan or a pitch
• which popular SEO stats are outdated or have no traceable source

Key SEO statistics for 2026

Every figure on this page was opened at its primary source on September 30, 2026. Our rule as a Montréal SEO agency is simple: no primary source, no stat. Roundup pages helped us find leads, but we cite only the study, survey, dataset or official statement itself. Where two studies disagree, we show both and explain the difference in method. Short on time? Here are the ten numbers that shape search right now.

• 91.1%Google holds 91.1% of the worldwide search engine market across all devices (StatCounter, August 2026).
• 5 trillionGoogle handles more than 5 trillion searches a year (Google, 2025).
• 2.5 billionGoogle’s AI Overviews have more than 2.5 billion monthly users (Google I/O, May 2026).
• 20.02%The first organic result gets a 20.02% click-through rate on US desktop results, and 9.69% on results that show an AI Overview (Advanced Web Ranking, July 2026 data).
• 74.3%74.3% of US desktop results with an AI Overview end without an organic click, compared with 53.6% without one (Advanced Web Ranking, July 2026 data).
• 38%Only 38% of pages cited in AI Overviews rank in Google’s top 10, down from 76% in July 2025 (Ahrefs, March 2026).
• 96.55%96.55% of pages in a 14-billion-page sample get zero traffic from Google (Ahrefs, updated 2026).
• 48%48% of mobile sites pass all three Core Web Vitals (HTTP Archive Web Almanac 2025).
• 45%45% of US consumers used AI tools for local business recommendations, up from 6% a year earlier (BrightLocal, 2026).
• 77%77% of SEO professionals worry that AI answers will reduce clicks to websites (Search Engine Journal, State of SEO 2026).

Search engine market share statistics

StatCounter measures the share of page views referred by each search engine across the sites it tracks, more than 3 billion page views a month. It counts referrals rather than queries, but it remains the most cited public benchmark.

• Google holds 91.1% of worldwide search engine market share and Bing 4.5% (StatCounter, August 2026).
• Yahoo has 1.23%, Yandex 0.99%, DuckDuckGo 0.7% and Baidu 0.62% of the worldwide market (StatCounter, August 2026).
• In Canada, Google’s share drops to 85.66% and Bing climbs to 9.56%, ahead of Yahoo (2.57%) and DuckDuckGo (1.62%) (StatCounter Canada, August 2026).
• In the United States, Google holds 86.1% and Bing 8.92% (StatCounter US, August 2026).
• On mobile, Google reaches 95.68% worldwide and Bing only 0.69% (StatCounter mobile, September 2026).
• On desktop, Bing’s worldwide share rises to 14.62%, with Google at 78.12% (StatCounter desktop, September 2026).
• Microsoft’s search and news advertising revenue, excluding traffic acquisition costs, grew 10% in the quarter ended June 30, 2026 (Microsoft, FY26 Q4 earnings).

For a Canadian business, Bing’s near 10% share is worth a look, especially since its share is higher on desktop. Verifying your site in Bing Webmaster Tools is a simple first step, and Microsoft Copilot draws its web answers from Bing Search.

Google search volume statistics

Despite the rise of AI tools, Google and Alphabet report that search volume keeps growing. These search engine statistics come from Google and Alphabet directly, plus one clickstream estimate.

• Google sees more than 5 trillion searches a year, roughly 13.7 billion a day by our math (Google, March 2025).
• Google searches grew 21.64% from 2023 to 2024, to more than 14 billion a day, according to a clickstream estimate (SparkToro and Datos, 2025).
• The same estimate puts Google at about 373 times as many searches as ChatGPT in 2024 (SparkToro and Datos, 2025).
• Alphabet says search queries reached an all-time high in the first quarter of 2026 (Alphabet, June 2026).
• Alphabet’s Search and other revenue grew 17% year over year in Q2 2026 (Alphabet, Q2 2026 earnings).
• 15% of the searches Google processes every day are ones it has never seen before (Google, How Search Works).
• The Google index covers hundreds of billions of webpages and is well over 100,000,000 gigabytes in size (Google, How Search Works).
• In 2023, Google ran over 700,000 experiments that led to more than 4,000 improvements to Search (Google, How Search Works).
• People run nearly 20 billion visual searches with Google Lens every month (Google, October 2024).

According to Google’s own figures, search volume hasn’t shrunk. What has changed is what happens after the query, as the next sections show.

Organic CTR statistics by position

Click-through rate by position is one of the most searched SEO stats, and also one of the most misquoted. Two studies stand out because they publish their method.

• On results with an AI Overview, position 1 gets a 9.69% CTR, 52% lower than its 20.02% average across all results (Advanced Web Ranking, July 2026 data).
• The #1 result had an average CTR of 27.6% in a study of 4 million Google results and 12.2 million queries (Backlinko, 2019 study, updated 2025).
• The top 3 results got 54.4% of all clicks in that study (Backlinko).
• Only 0.63% of searchers clicked a result on the second page (Backlinko).
• Moving up one position raised relative CTR by 32.3% on average (Backlinko).
• The #1 result was 10 times more likely to be clicked than the #10 result (Backlinko).

Why such a gap between 20% and 27.6%? The two studies use different data and different years: Advanced Web Ranking tracks current search results, AI Overviews included, while the Backlinko study was first published in 2019, before AI Overviews launched. Use the recent figure for forecasts and keep the older one as a historical benchmark. In both studies, the drop from the top 3 to the rest of the first page is steep.

Zero-click search statistics

A zero-click search ends without a click to any result: the answer appears on the results page, or the user refines the query or leaves. These statistics measure it from different angles.

• 74.3% of US desktop search results with an AI Overview end without an organic click, compared with 53.6% of results without one (Advanced Web Ranking, July 2026 data).
• 58.5% of US Google searches and 59.7% of EU searches ended without a click (SparkToro and Datos, 2024).
• For every 1,000 Google searches, 360 clicks in the US and 374 in the EU reach a website that Google doesn’t own (SparkToro and Datos, 2024).
• Almost 30% of all clicks go to platforms Google owns, such as YouTube videos, Maps and Images (SparkToro and Datos, 2024).
• In a 2022 US panel, 25.6% of desktop searches and 57% of mobile searches were zero-click (Semrush, May 2022 data).
• Users ended their browsing session on 26% of pages with an AI summary, compared with 16% of pages with only traditional results (Pew Research Center, 2025).
• Google says total organic click volume to websites has been “relatively stable year-over-year,” without publishing figures (Google, August 2025).

The numbers vary with the panel: SparkToro uses a clickstream panel of real users, while Advanced Web Ranking looks at tracked keywords. The trend is the same, though. Track impressions, brand searches and AI citations alongside clicks, or you’ll miss part of your visibility.

AI Overviews statistics

Google AI Overviews are the biggest change to the search results page in years. How often they appear depends heavily on the keyword panel, so each figure below says what it measures.

• AI Overviews have more than 2.5 billion monthly users (Google I/O, May 2026).
• AI Overviews appeared on 43% of sampled US desktop search results in July 2026 (Advanced Web Ranking).
• They appeared on about 48% of tracked queries in February 2026, up from about 30% a year earlier (BrightEdge, 2026).
• The share of keywords triggering an AI Overview went from 6.49% in January 2025 to nearly 25% in July, then down to 15.69% in November 2025, across more than 10 million keywords (Semrush, 2025).
• 18% of the real Google searches made by 900 US adults in March 2025 produced an AI summary (Pew Research Center, 2025).
• An AI Overview now correlates with a 58% lower average CTR for the top-ranking page, across 300,000 keywords (Ahrefs, February 2026), up from 34.5% in Ahrefs’ first study (Ahrefs, April 2025).
• Organic CTR on queries with AI Overviews fell from 1.76% in June 2024 to 0.61% in September 2025, a 61% drop, across 3,119 queries from 42 organizations (Seer Interactive, 2025).
• Brands cited in the AI Overview got a 35% higher organic CTR and a 91% higher paid CTR than brands that weren’t cited (Seer Interactive, 2025).
• Keywords that started triggering AI Overviews lost 15.49% of their CTR on average, while branded keywords gained 18.68%, across 700,000 keywords (Amsive, 2025).
• When an AI Overview and a featured snippet both appeared, CTR dropped 37.04% (Amsive, 2025).
• Users clicked a traditional result on 8% of visits with an AI summary, compared with 15% without one (Pew Research Center, 2025).
• Users clicked a link inside the AI summary on just 1% of visits (Pew Research Center, 2025).

Prevalence ranges from 15.69% to 48% because each study tracks a different set of keywords. The CTR studies agree on direction, from a 15% drop to a 61% drop, and on one nuance: in Seer’s data, being cited inside the AI Overview is associated with a smaller loss.

AI search and GEO statistics

Generative engine optimization (GEO) aims to get a brand cited in AI answers from ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or Google AI Mode. These AI search statistics show how big these platforms are and what they send to websites.

• Google AI Mode passed 1 billion monthly active users, and the Gemini app has 950 million (Alphabet, Q2 2026 earnings).
• ChatGPT has more than 900 million weekly active users and more than 50 million paying subscribers (OpenAI, February 2026).
• About half of US adults (49%) now use AI chatbots: 44% use ChatGPT and 24% Gemini (Pew Research Center, 2026).
• 42% of US adults say they use chatbots to search for information (Pew Research Center, 2026).
• AI tools made up 3.2% of US desktop searches across 41 search-heavy sites, compared with 73.7% for Google (SparkToro and Datos, Q4 2025 data).
• AI platforms generated more than 1.1 billion referral visits in June 2025, up 357% year over year (Similarweb, 2025).
• Across about 35,000 websites, AI sent just 0.1% of total referral traffic (Ahrefs, data to January 2025).
• ChatGPT’s share of generative AI web visits fell from about 76% to about 53% between June 2025 and May 2026, while Gemini rose to about 27% to 28%; ChatGPT’s visits stayed roughly flat as the category grew (Similarweb, 2026 estimates).
• Only 38% of pages cited in AI Overviews ranked in Google’s top 10, down from 76% in July 2025, across 863,000 keywords (Ahrefs, March 2026).
• Another panel finds only about 17% overlap between AI Overview sources and the organic top 10 (BrightEdge, 2026).
• Branded web mentions correlate with AI Overview visibility at 0.656, ahead of Domain Rating at 0.326, across 75,000 brands (Ahrefs, 2025).
• Reddit’s share of ChatGPT citations went from close to 60% of responses in early August 2025 to about 10% by mid-September, in a 230,000-prompt sample (Semrush, 2025).
• Prediction: Gartner expected traditional search engine volume to drop 25% by 2026 because of AI chatbots (Gartner, February 2024).
• Prediction: Gartner expects brands’ organic search traffic to fall 50% or more by 2028 (Gartner, December 2023).

AI platforms are growing fast, but Google still sends far more traffic. The citation data says something useful for planning: in Ahrefs’ data, a top 10 ranking now correlates less with AI citations, while brand mentions across the web correlate more. That is the core of a GEO strategy. Keep the Gartner forecasts as forecasts, since Alphabet reported record query volume in 2026.

Content and keyword statistics

These content statistics come from very large datasets. They explain why most pages never get organic traffic, and why time matters in SEO.

• 96.55% of pages in a sample of about 14 billion pages from Ahrefs’ Content Explorer get zero traffic from Google, and 1.94% get between one and ten visits a month (Ahrefs, updated 2026).
• The average page ranking #1 on Google is 5 years old (Ahrefs, 1.3 million keywords, 2025).
• 72.9% of pages in the top 10 are more than three years old, compared with 59% in 2017 (Ahrefs, 2025).
• Only 13.7% of top-10 pages are under a year old, down from 22% in 2017 (Ahrefs, 2025).
• Only 1.74% of newly published pages reach the top 10 within a year, down from 5.7% in 2017 (Ahrefs, 2025).
• Keywords with fewer than 10 searches a month make up almost 93% of Ahrefs’ US keyword database (Ahrefs, updated 2026).
• That is 2.3 billion keywords, compared with just under 18,000 keywords above 100,000 monthly searches (Ahrefs, updated 2026).
• 91.8% of search terms are long-tail keywords, and the average keyword is 1.9 words long, across 306 million keywords (Backlinko, 2020).

Two lessons. First, publishing is easy and ranking is hard: most pages never earn organic traffic. Second, the pages that rank tend to be older, which makes a good case for improving pages that already rank before starting new ones. Our guide to common SEO mistakes covers the content problems we see most often.

Backlink and link building statistics

Backlinks are still one of the strongest signals in the data, even if correlation studies can’t prove cause and effect.

• About 20 million pages in Ahrefs’ index have no referring domains, and only 2,997 of them get more than 1,000 search visits a month (Ahrefs, updated 2026).
• The #1 result on Google has 3.8 times more backlinks than positions 2 to 10, across 11.8 million search results (Backlinko, correlation study, page updated 2025).
• The #1 result also has about 3 times more referring domains than positions 2 to 10 (Backlinko).
• Buying a link on an existing page cost $361.44 on average, based on outreach to 450 sites in nine niches (Ahrefs, updated 2024).
• A paid guest post cost $77.80 on average, based on pitches to 180 sites (Ahrefs, updated 2024).

Keep one rule in mind with the last two numbers: Google’s spam policies treat buying links that pass ranking credit as link spam. Earned links, from content, mentions and partnerships, carry less risk. If you’re building your first links, our list of article submission sites we checked shows which platforms still give a followed link.

Technical SEO and mobile statistics

The HTTP Archive Web Almanac analyzes millions of sites every year with real-user data from the Chrome UX Report. It is one of the most complete public sources for technical SEO statistics.

• 48% of mobile sites and 56% of desktop sites pass all three Core Web Vitals (Web Almanac 2025, July 2025 data).
• 62% of mobile sites have a good Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), compared with 74% on desktop (Web Almanac 2025).
• 77% of mobile sites have a good Interaction to Next Paint (INP), compared with 97% on desktop (Web Almanac 2025).
• 81% of mobile pages have a good Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) score, compared with 72% on desktop (Web Almanac 2025).
• 97.3% of mobile homepages use HTTPS, up from 95.6% (Web Almanac 2025).
• More than 98.8% of mobile requests go over HTTPS (Web Almanac 2025).
• JSON-LD structured data appears on 41% of pages, up from 34% in 2022 (Web Almanac 2024).
• The most common schema type, WebSite, appears on only 12.73% of mobile pages (Web Almanac 2024).
• Only about 2% of sites publish an llms.txt file, many of them generated automatically by an SEO plugin (Web Almanac 2025).
• Worldwide, mobile accounts for 49.36% of web traffic and desktop for 49.11% (StatCounter, August 2026).
• Dated: 46% of US adults used digital voice assistants in 2017, mostly on smartphones (42%) (Pew Research Center, 2017). We found no recent primary study on voice search use.
• In Canada, desktop still leads with 54.68%, compared with 42.48% for mobile (StatCounter Canada, August 2026).

LCP is the hardest metric to pass on mobile, and it measures how fast the main content loads, so page speed work usually starts there. An SEO audit shows where your pages stand on these metrics and which fixes come first.

Local SEO statistics

BrightLocal publishes the largest yearly surveys on local search, and Google shares Maps figures once or twice a year. These local SEO statistics cover reviews, search behavior and AI. The BrightLocal surveys poll US consumers.

• 97% of consumers read reviews for local businesses, and 41% always do (BrightLocal, Local Consumer Review Survey 2026).
• Google’s share as a review source fell from 83% in 2025 to 71% in 2026 (BrightLocal, 2026).
• Use of ChatGPT and other AI tools for local recommendations rose from 6% to 45% in a year (BrightLocal, 2026).
• 68% of consumers will only use a business with four stars or more, up from 55% in 2025, and 31% require 4.5 stars or more (BrightLocal, 2026).
• 74% look for reviews written in the last three months, and 89% expect businesses to respond to reviews (BrightLocal, 2026).
• 83% of people asked to leave a review went on to leave one (BrightLocal, 2026).
• 52% of consumers started their last local business search on Google Search and 9% on Google Maps (BrightLocal, Consumer Search Behavior 2026).
• 73% of local business searches started on a mobile device, and 75% of consumers used more than one channel (BrightLocal, 2026).
• Only 6% of consumers just clicked the top result, and 65% were put off a business by review-related reasons (BrightLocal, 2026).
• 75% of consumers take less than 30 minutes to decide which business to use (BrightLocal, 2026).
• Google Business Profile is the most cited source in local AI answers, with 28.63% of citations across 200,085 local searches (BrightLocal, Local AI Visibility Study, September 2026).
• Google Maps mentions a tracked business in 66% of searches, compared with 32% to 38% on AI surfaces such as AI Overviews, ChatGPT and AI Mode (BrightLocal, 2026).
• More than 2 billion people use Google Maps every month (Google, October 2024).
• Maps draws on information from more than 300 million places, with reviews from more than 500 million contributors (Google, March 2026).
• In 2025, Google blocked or removed more than 292 million policy-violating reviews and over 13 million fake Business Profiles (Google, April 2026).
• Dated but still cited: 76% of people who search for something nearby on a smartphone visit a business within a day, and 28% of those searches lead to a purchase (Google, 2016).
• Dated: mobile “near me” searches containing “can I buy” or “to buy” grew more than 500% in two years (Google, 2015 to 2017 US data).

Local search now runs across Google, Maps and AI assistants at the same time. Your Business Profile is the most cited local source in AI answers, and recent reviews with replies weigh on the final choice. For local service businesses, such as those we help with SEO for plumbers, these numbers help decide where to start.

SEO industry statistics

These SEO industry statistics come from surveys of marketers and SEO professionals. They describe what the industry thinks and plans, so read them as opinions and intentions rather than measured results.

• Algorithm changes are the top challenge for 59% of SEO professionals, according to a survey of 371 professionals in 52 countries (Search Engine Journal, State of SEO 2026).
• 77% worry that AI answers will reduce clicks to websites, and 60% reported more organic traffic over the year (Search Engine Journal, State of SEO 2026).
• 81% of search professionals expect SEO investment to increase or hold steady next year, and 43% plan to invest in or prioritize GEO (Search Engine Journal, State of Search 2027).
• 40.6% of marketers are updating their SEO for search changes, one of the top trends of 2026, in a survey of more than 1,500 marketers (HubSpot, State of Marketing 2026).
• 70.2% of marketers believe they can adapt their strategy to changes in organic search such as AI Overviews (HubSpot, 2026).
• 79.2% of marketing teams expect at least a slight budget increase in 2026, and 35.4% list website, blog and SEO among their top investments (HubSpot, 2026).
• 94% of 250+ US enterprise leaders surveyed plan to increase their answer engine optimization (AEO) investment in 2026 (Conductor, 2026).
• Enterprises allocated an average of 12% of their digital budgets to AEO in 2025 (Conductor, 2026).
• 54% of organizations rely on their SEO and digital marketing teams to lead AI search initiatives (BrightEdge survey of 750+ professionals, 2025).
• In 2019 data, organic search drove 53.3% of trackable website traffic on average across industries (BrightEdge, Channel Report 2019).

The industry is spending more on search, and part of that money is moving toward AI visibility. In most organizations, the same SEO and digital marketing teams handle both.

SEO stats to stop citing in 2026

Some SEO stats circulate from list to list without a traceable source, or with a source that says something else. Here are four we looked for and couldn’t confirm as stated.

• “Google processes 40,000 searches per second (3.5 billion a day).” This is an old third-party extrapolation from a 2012 Google figure. Google’s own figure, published in 2025, is more than 5 trillion searches a year.
• “68% of online experiences begin with a search engine.” The closest primary source we found, the BrightEdge Channel Report 2019, says “68% of all trackable website traffic is sourced from Organic and Paid Search.” That is a 2019 traffic share, a different claim.
• “46% of Google searches have local intent.” It traces back to a 2018 conference remark relayed on social media. We found no Google study or document that publishes it.
• “76% of AI Overview sources rank in the top 10.” This was true of Ahrefs’ July 2025 data. Its January 2026 data shows 38%.

Before you put a statistic in a pitch deck, open the original study and check three things: the date, the sample and the exact wording.

How to use these SEO statistics

Statistics help you set realistic expectations, choose priorities and frame the return on investment (ROI) discussion with real numbers. Use the CTR and zero-click data to forecast traffic per position, the AI Overview data to decide which queries still bring clicks, and the local data to prioritize reviews and your Business Profile. Then compare these benchmarks with your own Search Console data before you build an SEO strategy: your data always beats an industry average for your site.

At SEO Montreal, we use these studies to build realistic plans for more than 500 clients in over 25 industries. To see which of these trends weigh most on your own traffic, talk to our SEO team: the first 30-minute consultation is free.

FAQ: SEO statistics

What percentage of Google searches end without a click?

It depends on the study. SparkToro and Datos found that 58.5% of US Google searches ended without a click in 2024. Advanced Web Ranking measured 74.3% zero-click results when an AI Overview appeared in July 2026, compared with 53.6% without one. The two studies use different panels, but both show that most searches end on Google itself.

What is the average CTR of the first position on Google?

The most recent public data, from Advanced Web Ranking, puts position 1 at a 20.02% click-through rate on US desktop searches in July 2026. When an AI Overview appears, that falls to 9.69%. The older Backlinko study, based on 2019 data, found 27.6%. Use the recent figure for forecasts, since search results now include more features.

How many searches does Google handle per day?

Google says it sees more than 5 trillion searches a year, which works out to roughly 13.7 billion a day. A SparkToro and Datos clickstream estimate puts the 2024 figure at more than 14 billion a day. Alphabet also reported that search queries reached an all-time high in early 2026, despite the growth of AI chatbots.

How often do AI Overviews appear in Google results?

Estimates range from 15.69% to 48% of tracked keywords, depending on the study and the keyword panel. Advanced Web Ranking saw AI Overviews on 43% of sampled US desktop results in July 2026, BrightEdge on about 48% of tracked queries in February 2026, and Semrush on 15.69% of keywords in November 2025.

Do AI Overviews reduce organic traffic?

Most studies find lower click-through rates for the pages below them. Ahrefs found a 58% lower CTR for the top-ranking page when an AI Overview appears, Seer Interactive a 61% drop in organic CTR, and Pew Research Center fewer clicks on regular results (8% versus 15%). Google says overall organic click volume has stayed relatively stable, without publishing figures.

What share of web pages get no traffic from Google?

According to Ahrefs, 96.55% of a sample of about 14 billion pages get zero traffic from Google, and 1.94% get between one and ten visits a month. Backlinks are part of the picture: only 2,997 of about 20 million pages without referring domains get more than 1,000 visits a month. Low search demand and weak content also play a role.

Is SEO still worth it in 2026?

The data points to yes, with a broader scope. Google handles more than 5 trillion searches a year, AI tools account for 3.2% of US desktop searches on 41 tracked sites, and 81% of search professionals expect SEO investment to grow or hold steady. What changes is the goal: rank in Google, and also earn mentions and citations in AI answers.

How often are these SEO statistics updated?

This edition was checked in full on September 30, 2026, and market share figures change every month. Each statistic shows its source, its publication or data date and a link to the original study, so you can verify it yourself. Older but still useful figures are labeled as dated, and forecasts are labeled as predictions.

SEO statistics sources and methodology

Every statistic on this page was checked at its primary source on September 30, 2026: the organization that ran the study, survey or dataset, or the official company statement. Roundup pages were used only as leads. When we couldn’t reach the original document, or when it didn’t contain the figure, we left the statistic out. Figures older than 2024 are labeled with their year, forecasts are labeled as predictions, and StatCounter figures are monthly snapshots. Full credit goes to the teams below.

• Google and Alphabet: How Search Works, Google I/O 2026 keynote, June 2026 investor presentation, Q2 2026 earnings, Maps trust and safety report.
• StatCounter Global Stats: search engine market share and desktop vs mobile share, more than 3 billion page views a month.
• Advanced Web Ranking: Google organic CTR study, more than 1.75 million US search results a month.
• Pew Research Center: AI summaries and clicks (browsing data of 900 US adults) and Americans and AI 2026 (5,119 US adults).
• Ahrefs: search traffic study, time to rank, AI Overviews and CTR, AI Overview citations, long-tail keywords.
• SparkToro and Datos: zero-click study 2024 and search across 41 websites.
• Semrush and Backlinko: AI Overviews study, Google CTR stats, search engine ranking factors.
• Seer Interactive, Amsive and BrightEdge: AI Overview CTR update, AI Overviews click drop-off, AI Overviews one year later.
• HTTP Archive: Web Almanac 2025 and Web Almanac 2024 structured data, based on the Chrome UX Report and the HTTP Archive crawl.
• BrightLocal: Local Consumer Review Survey 2026, Consumer Search Behavior and Local AI Visibility Study.
• Industry surveys: Search Engine Journal State of SEO 2026, HubSpot State of Marketing 2026, Conductor State of AEO/GEO, Gartner predictions.
• AI platforms and traffic: OpenAI, Similarweb, Microsoft FY26 Q4 earnings.