Can I quote these figures?

Quote the original source, which is linked in each row, and keep the sample and date with the number. For our own two studies, the data and a citation line are on the study pages.

Why are so many from companies that sell AI visibility tools?

Because they are the ones with the data. A tracker sees millions of answers; nobody else does. It also means each study measures that company's customers and prompts, so two studies can disagree and both be right.

How often is this page updated?

The date at the top is when every source was last read. Figures on AI search go stale within months, so treat anything older than a year as history.

AI Search Statistics: Every Figure With Its Source and Sample

How to read this page

A statistic is only as good as its denominator. "71% of citations" and "71% of cited domains" are different claims, and we found the first form quoted for a study that says the second. Where the way a figure is usually repeated differs from what its source says, the row gives what the source says.

We read every source on 14 November 2026.

What AI answers cite

Figure	What it counts	Sample and date	Source
74%	Share of cited sources that were blog content (listicles 30%, blog posts 29%, comparisons 14%)	2,671 sources from 96 questions put to ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude, 20 October 2026	Outrank
17% to 94%	The same share by assistant: ChatGPT 17%, Gemini 74%, Perplexity 85%, Claude 94%	Same study	Outrank
53.7%	Share of citations going to company-owned pages. News and media: 16.9%	6,095,520 citations, 17 US industries, 7 engines, July to August 2026	Otterly
38%	Share of Google AI Overview citations that point at the first 100 words of a page	100,000 citation placements from 10,000 responses, 2 June 2026. Stated as correlational	Surfer

The spread in the second row matters more than the average in the first. "AI answers cite blogs" is true of Claude and Perplexity in that test and not of ChatGPT.

Our own check of Google's AI Overviews, on a different set of questions, found a different mix:

Figure	What it counts	Sample and date	Source
29%	Share of AI Overview citations that were articles and guides	356 citations from 42 AI Overviews for 48 buyer questions, US, 14 November 2026	Our study
22%	Share that were YouTube videos	Same study	Our study
44 of 81	Citations that were comparison pages, for "X or Y" questions	Same study	Our study
195 of 212	Sites cited only once	Same study	Our study

Do the assistants agree with each other?

Figure	What it counts	Sample and date	Source
71%	Share of cited domains that appeared in only one of five models. For individual URLs: 89%	2.04 million citations from 134,673 responses, published 24 March 2026. ChatGPT, AI Overviews, Gemini, Grok and Copilot; not Claude or Perplexity	Temso
14.4%	Share of cited domains that an average pair of models has in common	Same study	Temso
89.1%	Share of pages Claude cited that were also in Brave Search's top 20 for the query	1,000 prompts, 8,500 URLs, published 28 October 2026. Not confirmed by Anthropic	Peec AI

How long a citation lasts

Figure	What it counts	Sample and date	Source
11 days	Median time from a page's citation peak to half of that peak share. Not how long a citation lasts	883,000 pages, 7 engines, 8 September 2025 to 8 September 2026	Profound
42 days	Median time from a page's first citation to half of its peak share	Same study	Profound

AI crawlers and robots.txt

Figure	What it counts	Sample and date	Source
19 of 56	Large sites that block GPTBot, the training crawler	60 well-known sites, 56 readable, 14 November 2026	Our study
8 of 56	Large sites that block OAI-SearchBot, the crawler behind ChatGPT search	Same study	Our study
0 of 98	B2B software vendors that block an AI search crawler site-wide. 2 block a training crawler	98 vendors from 24 US buyer searches, checked 9 October 2026	Frase
None	Major AI crawlers that ran JavaScript	Requests seen on Vercel's network, published 17 December 2024. Two years old	Vercel

llms.txt

Figure	What it counts	Sample and date	Source
19 of 48	Large sites with an llms.txt. 5 of the 19 follow the format on every point	60 well-known sites, 48 clear answers, 14 November 2026	Our study
58 of 93	B2B software vendors with an llms.txt	Checked 9 October 2026	Frase
84 of 62,100+	AI crawler visits that went to the llms.txt on a test site	One site, 90 days; page last updated February 2026	Otterly

AI-written content and Google

Figure	What it counts	Sample and date	Source
86.5%	Top-20 pages containing some AI-generated text, by Ahrefs' own detector	About 600,000 pages for 100,000 keywords, July 2025	Ahrefs
0.011	Correlation between the share of AI text on a page and its ranking position	Same study	Ahrefs
2 of 2	Test sites of 1,000 AI posts each that Google removed from its index (within 8 days and 12 weeks)	One experiment	Otterly
2.0x	Median growth in Google clicks by days 197 to 224 for sites using one AI SEO product	2,119 sites, data to 25 September 2026. No control group	Outrank
24.4%	Sites using that product that had fewer clicks than before they joined	1,383 sites followed for 90 days or more	Outrank

How writers use AI

Figure	What it counts	Sample and date	Source
95%	Creators who use AI somewhere in their blogging	80 of 81 respondents, 8 April to 18 May 2026, mostly the publisher's own audience, about ten points of margin	RightBlogger
50%	Creators who never tell readers they used it	Same survey	RightBlogger

What is not here

Figures we could not trace to a stated sample, which is most of what circulates. If a number you have seen quoted is missing, that is usually why. Forecasts are left out too: a prediction is not a measurement.

Corrections

Before this page was written we checked our own notes against each source, and eight figures needed correcting: a share of domains noted down as a share of citations, a half-life noted down as a lifespan, a sample attached to the wrong finding. The rows above give what each source says. If you find one that no longer matches, the source wins.

AI search statistics, each with its source and sample