GEO Statistics 2026: 20 Sourced Numbers on AI Search and Citations

Quick quiz

How should you get mentioned by ChatGPT and other AI assistants?

Question 1 of 425%

What do you want to know or change?

Just see if AI assistants talk about my businessFollow it over time against my competitorsBe mentioned more often, starting now

This roundup gathers the GEO statistics that help decide whether and how to invest in generative engine optimization: how many people use AI assistants, how AI answers change clicks, and what these assistants cite. We kept only figures we could verify at their source in October 2026, and we say when a number comes from a vendor or from our own data. For the discipline itself, see GEO vs SEO.

How many people use AI assistants?

OpenAI's figure was announced on stage and reported by TechCrunch, after 500 million at the end of March 2025 and about 700 million in August 2025. The academic view comes from the NBER paper written with OpenAI researchers. Google's numbers come from Sundar Pichai's Q2 2025 earnings remarks.

How do AI answers affect clicks?

The best independent measurement so far comes from the Pew Research Center, which analyzed the browsing of 900 US adults in March 2025 (published July 22, 2025):

• Users clicked a traditional search result on 8% of visits when Google showed an AI summary, against 15% when it did not.
• They clicked a link inside the AI summary on 1% of visits.
• AI summaries appeared on 18% of the searches studied (12,593 of 68,879 unique searches).

Google, for its part, states in its documentation that clicks from pages with AI Overviews tend to be of higher quality. Both can be true: fewer clicks on informational queries, with visitors who arrive further along in their decision. Our article on AI Mode vs AI Overviews explains the two Google surfaces.

Can content changes increase AI visibility?

The research paper that named the field, GEO: Generative Engine Optimization (Aggarwal et al., accepted at KDD 2024), tested content changes on generative answers and found that methods such as adding statistics, quotations and citations can raise a source's visibility by up to 40%, with effects that vary by domain. It remains the main peer-reviewed evidence that GEO techniques work.

What do AI assistants cite? Data from Sorank's panel

Sorank measures what five assistants cite on a panel of business questions. The figures below come from our AI citation report and model studies, covering August 2025 to August 2026. They are our own data: 301,025 AI answers, 1,820,738 citations and 131,349 distinct domains, with 79% of the questions asked in French and the rest in English.

• On ChatGPT, Wikipedia is the most cited platform at 3.43% of answers, ahead of Trustpilot at 2.7% (ChatGPT citation study).
• ChatGPT's citation density fell from 5.8 to 4.1 sources per answer over the 13 months measured.
• Reddit is cited in 4.11% of Grok answers but 0% of Claude answers (Reddit AI citation study).
• In August 2026, the most cited platforms across the panel were Trustpilot (1.81%) and Wikipedia (1.39%).

What these GEO statistics mean for a business

1. Reach is there: hundreds of millions of people ask assistants questions every week, including buying questions.
2. Clicks shift: informational queries with AI summaries send fewer visits; the visibility moves into the answer.
3. Sources concentrate: assistants name a handful of sources, and third-party platforms weigh heavily, so presence on reviews, encyclopedic pages and forums matters as much as your own pages.
4. Content works: research shows that clearer, sourced, data-rich content is cited more.

For wider context, see our SEO statistics, AI marketing statistics and Google search statistics.

The bottom line

AI search reaches billions of users, changes where clicks go and rewards brands that the cited sources talk about. To see where your brand stands, track a panel of buyer questions with AI mention tracking or run a free GEO audit. Sorank, SEO and GEO software that runs on autopilot, publishes the sourced content AI answers quote and tracks your mentions; see the Sorank plans, with a 3-day free trial.