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SEO data · by Pedram Oreizi, Partner · updated October 2026SEO statistics for 2026. Checked at the source.
The SEO and AI search statistics that matter for your business: how people search now, what Google's AI answers do to your clicks, what goes with being named in AI answers, and which much-quoted stats should have retired years ago. Every number links to the people who measured it.
Free and written. Within 1 business day. No call needed.
12 numbers worth knowing.
The short version. Every card links to the original study, so you can check our homework.
- 58%
lower click rate on Google's top result when an AI Overview shows, against Ahrefs' estimate for the same searches without one.
ahrefs.com · 150,000 keywords · Feb 2026 - 64%
of Google searches in Canada end with no click at all. Only 268 in every 1,000 send a visit to a website.
sparktoro.com · Jan to Apr 2026 - 8% vs 15%
Google users clicked a regular result on 8% of visits with an AI summary on the page, and on 15% without one.
pewresearch.org · 900 US adults · 2025 - 1.2B+
people use ChatGPT each week.
openai.com · Oct 2026 - 56×
more website visits from Google than from all AI assistants combined, across 115,254 websites.
ahrefs.com · Sept 2026 · our math - 12.1%
of Ahrefs' signups came from AI search, which sent just 0.5% of its visitors.
ahrefs.com · June 2025 - 2.5B+
people a month see Google's AI Overviews.
blog.google · June 2026 - 0.664
correlation between brand mentions across the web and showing up in AI Overviews, the strongest Ahrefs measured. Backlinks scored 0.218.
ahrefs.com · 75,000 brands · 2025 - 45%
of US consumers used ChatGPT or another AI tool for local recommendations.
brightlocal.com · 1,002 adults · Feb 2026 - 46%
of Canadians online used generative AI in the past year. 52% of them used it as a search engine.
cira.ca · 2,000 adults · 2026 - 19.2%
of Canadian businesses use AI to make products or deliver services, triple the share in 2024.
statcan.gc.ca · spring 2026 - 522
websites still link to a popular stats page using a misquoted 2019 number as the link text.
Our analysis of Ahrefs link data · Oct 2026 · see the stat check
What the SEO statistics say in 2026.
Google still sends far more website visits than any AI assistant, but its AI answers now take many of the clicks on information searches. AI visitors are few, yet they can convert well. And several of the most-quoted SEO stats are years old, misquoted or unsourced.
We traced every number on this page to the organization that measured it. Each one says who measured it and when, plus the sample where it matters, so you can judge it yourself.
Most of the research is American. Where Canadian figures exist, we use them and say so.
Google is still the front door.
Google handles more than 5 trillion searches a year (Google, 2025). That's about 14 billion a day, by our math.
It refers 89.9% of the visits that search engines send to websites worldwide (StatCounter, September 2026). In Canada it's 85.3%, and Bing has 10.1% (StatCounter). On Canadian desktops, Bing's share climbs to 18.9% (StatCounter).
AI assistants are growing, from a small base. Across 115,254 websites, Google sent 23.96% of all visits in September 2026. Every AI assistant combined sent 0.43% (Ahrefs).
- Google23.96%
- All AI assistants combined0.43%
- ChatGPT alone0.34%
Source: Ahrefs AI vs. Search benchmark, Ahrefs Web Analytics data, updated 26 October 2026. Clicks from Google's AI Overviews arrive from Google, so they count as Google.
The gap looks smaller than it was. In early 2025, Ahrefs found Google sent 345 times more traffic than ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity combined (Ahrefs, March 2025). Now it's about 56 times, by our math.
The samples and the AI tools counted differ, so read that as a direction, not a precise trend.
One more reality check: most pages get no Google traffic at all. Ahrefs estimates that 96.55% of the 14 billion pages in its index get none (Ahrefs, 2023).
- Google is still your biggest source of customers from search. Keep investing in SEO.
- Set up Bing Places and Bing Webmaster Tools. Both are free, and Bing matters on Canadian desktops.
- Publish fewer, better pages. Most pages get no Google traffic.
AI Overviews are taking the first click.
Google's AI Overviews reach more than 2.5 billion people a month (Alphabet, June 2026). Its newer AI Mode had passed 1 billion monthly users by July (Alphabet, 2026).
How often do they appear? In Pew's tracking of real searches in March 2025, 18% produced an AI summary (Pew Research Center). Tools that track fixed keyword lists report more: 20.5% of results pages (Ahrefs, 2025) up to about 48% of the queries BrightEdge tracks (BrightEdge, February 2026).
When an AI Overview shows, the top result gets fewer clicks. Ahrefs tracked 150,000 keywords that show one, using Google Search Console data.
- December 2023, before AI Overviews7.3%
- December 2025, Ahrefs' estimate without an AI Overview3.7%
- December 2025, with the AI Overview1.6%
Source: Ahrefs, February 2026. Click rates rounded from 0.073, 0.037 and 0.016. Clicks fell everywhere, so the fair comparison is the last two bars: 58% lower in Ahrefs' unrounded data.
Pew saw the same thing in real browsing. With an AI summary on the page, people clicked a regular result on 8% of visits, against 15% without one (Pew Research Center, July 2025).
Just 1% of visits included a click on a link inside the summary itself.
Without an AI summaryWith an AI summary
- Clicked a regular search result15%without8%with
- Ended their browsing session16%without26%with
- Clicked a link inside the AI summary1%with
Source: Pew Research Center, July 2025. Browsing data from 900 US adults, March 2025, 68,879 Google searches. Shares are of page visits.
Being cited goes with more clicks. Seer Interactive tracked 3,119 informational searches for 42 client organizations. Organic click rates on searches with AI Overviews fell from 1.76% to 0.61% between June 2024 and September 2025 (Seer Interactive, November 2025).
Brands cited inside the Overview got 35% more organic clicks than brands that weren't. Seer is careful to call that a correlation, not proof.
- Expect fewer clicks on "what is" and "how to" searches, even when your rankings hold.
- Judge SEO by calls, bookings and sales, not visits alone.
- Aim to be the source the AI cites. Clear, specific answers on your own pages are the start.
Most Google searches end with zero clicks.
In the first four months of 2026, 63.8% of Google searches in Canada ended without a click (SparkToro, June 2026). In the US, it was 68% (SparkToro).
- 268 click through to a website, from a regular result or an ad
- 94 click to Google's own properties, like YouTube and Maps
- 638 end with no click: 382 stop there, 256 search again
Source: SparkToro, June 2026, from Similarweb panel data, January to April 2026. Counts per 1,000 are our math from SparkToro's shares, except the 268, which SparkToro publishes. Squares are rounded.
No click isn't always a loss. Some of those searchers got what they needed on the page: your hours, your phone number, directions. For a local business, a call from your Business Profile is a win with zero clicks.
You'll also see an older figure: 58.5% of US searches ended without a click in 2024 (SparkToro and Datos). That study used a different panel, so don't compare it directly with 2026.
- Treat your Google Business Profile as a landing page. Keep it as complete as your website.
- Count calls, direction requests and bookings from the profile. They never show up as website visits.
AI search visitors are few. They can convert well.
AI assistants send a sliver of traffic. In Ahrefs' study of 3,000 sites, 63% got at least one visitor from an AI chatbot, but AI made up 0.17% of visitors on average (Ahrefs, February 2025).
ChatGPT sends most of it: about four in five AI visits in Ahrefs' September 2026 benchmark, by our math (Ahrefs).
Those visitors can be worth a lot. On Ahrefs' own site, AI search brought 0.5% of visitors and 12.1% of signups. That's a conversion rate 23 times higher than regular organic search (Ahrefs, June 2025).
- Share of visitors from AI search0.5%
- Share of signups from AI search12.1%
Source: Ahrefs, June 2025. One company's own website data.
One site isn't a rule. Ahrefs sells to marketers, who adopted AI early. Treat it as a reason to measure your own AI visitors, not as a forecast.
- Add an AI channel in Google Analytics, so ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini visits are counted together. Our guide to measuring AI visibility shows how.
- Ask every new lead "How did you hear about us?" and list ChatGPT and Google's AI as options. Analytics doesn't catch every AI referral.
Mentions track AI Overview visibility more than links.
Ahrefs studied 75,000 brands to see what goes with showing up in AI Overviews. Brand mentions across the web had the strongest correlation, at 0.664. Domain Rating (Ahrefs' site-strength score) scored 0.326 and backlinks 0.218 (Ahrefs, May 2025).
AI also reads past page one. Only 38% of the pages cited in AI Overviews come from Google's top 10 for that search (Ahrefs, March 2026). Across ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and Perplexity, an average of 12% of cited links rank in Google's top 10 for the prompt (Ahrefs, August 2025).
And it likes fresh pages. Across 17 million citations, the pages AI assistants cited were 25.7% newer on average than the pages in Google's organic results (Ahrefs, July 2025).
- Get named on the lists, directories, review sites and videos in your industry. Mentions travel further than any one page.
- Update key pages when the facts change: prices, services, team. Real updates, not new dates.
- Our LLM SEO guide covers the steps in detail, and our AI search optimization page explains how we measure it.
Local search runs on reviews. And now AI.
Reviews are close to universal. 97% of US consumers read reviews for local businesses, and 41% say they always do, up from 29% a year earlier (BrightLocal, February 2026).
The bar is rising. 68% will only use a business rated four stars or higher, up from 55%. And 80% say they're likely to choose a business that responds to all its reviews (BrightLocal).
AI is now part of the search. 45% of consumers used ChatGPT or another AI tool for local recommendations, up from 6% the year before (BrightLocal).
The 2025 question was narrower, about using AI to find reviews, so part of that jump is in the asking.
People still check. 97% of the 455 AI users surveyed say they sometimes double-check AI recommendations against real reviews (BrightLocal, March 2026).
Where they read reviews is shifting, too. Google is still the top source, but its share fell from 83% to 71% in a year, while Apple Maps nearly doubled to 27% (BrightLocal).
- Keep a steady flow of genuine reviews, and reply to every one.
- Claim Apple Business Connect as well as your Google Business Profile.
- Our Google Business Profile guide has the full checklist. For Toronto businesses, see local SEO in Toronto.
- Law, dental and medical practices: your regulator's rules can limit review requests, testimonials and how you reply. Read our law firm, dental or healthcare page first.
Canada, by the numbers.
Canadians are picking up AI fast. 46% of Canadian adults online used a generative AI tool in the past year, up from 33% in 2025 and 16% in 2024. 52% of those users used it as a search engine, but only 19% always verify what it tells them (CIRA, 2026).
Businesses are following. 19.2% of Canadian businesses used AI to produce goods or deliver services in spring 2026, up from 12.2% in 2025 and 6.1% in 2024 (Statistics Canada). In the summer survey, 25.2% of businesses said they plan to use AI over the next 12 months, up from 10.6% two years earlier (Statistics Canada, August 2026).
Canadians online who used generative AI in the past yearBusinesses using AI to produce goods or deliver services
- 202416%Canadians6.1%businesses
- 202533%Canadians12.2%businesses
- 202646%Canadians19.2%businesses
Sources: CIRA Canadian Internet Trends 2026 (2,000 internet users 18+, online panel); Statistics Canada, Canadian Survey on Business Conditions (employer businesses, second quarter of each year). Different surveys, different questions.
At work, 35.9% of Canadian workers used generative AI tools in the past year (Statistics Canada, July 2026).
And Canadians like buying Canadian. 86% bought something online in the past year, and 65% of those shoppers prefer Canadian retailers when they have the choice (CIRA, 2026).
- If you're Canadian-owned, say so on your website and your Business Profile. Your buyers care.
- Answer questions the way people ask AI: specific, local and complete. Half of Canadian AI users have used it as a search engine.
Old SEO stats to retire.
Stats are like milk. Check the date.
We pulled the links pointing at two widely linked statistics pages and read the anchor text: the clickable words people use when they cite a number. The favourites are old, misquoted or have no source we could find.
- "68% of online experiences begin with a search engine" · misquoted 2019 data522
- "SEO drives 1,000% more traffic than organic social" · never said by the source183
- "46% of Google searches have local intent" · one tweet, 2018116
- "53.3% of all website traffic comes from organic search" · 201981
- "SEO leads have a 14.6% close rate" · 201253
Source: our analysis of Ahrefs backlink data, 27 October 2026. Live links, counted once per website, whose link text quotes the stat. The 46% links point to Backlinko's local SEO statistics page; the others point to Ahrefs' SEO statistics page, which no longer carries the 53.3% or 14.6% figures.
This isn't a knock on the roundups. They're useful, and the good ones link their sources. The trouble is the copy-paste chain: each copy drops a little context, until the number means something else.
| The stat | Where it really comes from | Say this instead |
|---|---|---|
| "68% of online experiences begin with a search engine" Misquoted | BrightEdge, 2019: organic and paid search drove 68% of the trackable traffic to thousands of websites it analyzed, with direct visits left out. "Online experiences" isn't in the report (BrightEdge). | Google handles more than 5 trillion searches a year (Google, 2025). |
| "SEO drives 1,000% more traffic than organic social" Derived | The same 2019 data: organic social sent about one-eleventh as much traffic as organic search. BrightEdge never wrote "1,000%". | Social sent 7.42% of visits to 115,254 sites in September 2026, and search 26.82%: about 3.6 times as much, not 11 (Ahrefs). |
| "53.3% of all website traffic comes from organic search" 2019 | BrightEdge, 2019: an average across five industries of trackable traffic, direct visits excluded. | Search engines sent 26.82% of all visits to those sites, direct visits included (Ahrefs, September 2026). |
| "46% of Google searches have local intent" No source | One attendee's tweet from a Google event in October 2018. We found no Google publication of it, and Search Engine Roundtable questioned it at the time. | 80% of US consumers search online for local businesses at least weekly (SOCi, 2024). |
| "SEO leads have a 14.6% close rate" 2012 | HubSpot's 2012 State of Inbound Marketing: median close rates at over 150 businesses using closed-loop analytics. Leads from direct traffic closed at about the same rate (HubSpot). | Your own close rate by lead source. It's the only one that predicts your results. |
| "76% of people who search for something nearby visit a business within a day" 2016 | Google, May 2016: a diary study of 1,000 smartphone users. Google's article now redirects; the PDF survives. | Use it with the year, or not at all. We found no newer Google figure. |
| "75% of people never scroll past the first page" No source | A HubSpot slide crediting an analytics firm's October 2010 data. We could find no study behind it. | 0.63% of searchers clicked a result on page two (Backlinko, about 2022 data). |
| "Google processes 3.5 billion searches a day" Outdated | A modelled estimate from Internet Live Stats, built on 2012 data. | More than 5 trillion a year, about 14 billion a day (Google, 2025). |
How to check a marketing stat in two minutes.
Ask four questions before a number goes in your deck, your website or your next board meeting.
- Who measured it? Find the organization that collected the data, not the blog that repeated it. If every link leads to another roundup, that's your answer.
- When? Search has changed fast since AI answers arrived. A 2019 traffic stat describes a world without them.
- Measured on whom? One company's customers, one country, one tool's users? A study of US software sites tells you little about a Toronto dental clinic.
- Does the source still say it? Pages get updated. The number you're quoting may have been changed or removed.
What to do this quarter.
Enough numbers. Here's what they add up to.
- Measure leads, not just visits. Count calls, bookings and forms. Add "How did you hear about us?" with ChatGPT and Google's AI as options, and an AI channel in Google Analytics.
- Own the searches AI can't finish. Prices, availability, "near me", booking and comparisons.
- Get mentioned where AI reads. The directories, lists, review sites and videos in your industry, so your name shows up next to what you do.
- Keep your Google Business Profile current. Hours, services, photos and a steady flow of genuine reviews, with a reply to each one.
- Publish specific facts, and update them for real. Prices, service areas, timelines. Specific facts give AI, and buyers, something to quote.
And be wary of anyone who promises rankings. "No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google," says Google itself. Our guide to choosing an AI SEO agency lists the other red flags.
How we checked these numbers.
- We traced each statistic to the organization that collected it, and read the figure on its own page, on 26 and 27 October 2026.
- We name the sample, place and date for each one. Most studies use American data; Canadian figures are labelled.
- Many studies come from software companies analyzing their own data. They're useful, but they aren't peer-reviewed, so we say when a number is an estimate or a correlation.
- For the stat check, we used Ahrefs Site Explorer on 27 October 2026. We counted live links, once per website, where the link text quotes the statistic, such as "68%" or "online experiences".
- Spotted an error or a newer study? Email hello@redlinetoronto.ca. We'll check it and update this page.
About the author. Pedram Oreizi is a partner at Redline Toronto, which does search marketing for Canadian businesses.
Redline Toronto, "SEO statistics for 2026, checked at the source," October 2026, https://redlinetoronto.ca/seo-statistics
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- 4.9×organic Google clicks for a law firm
- 8.9×organic Google clicks for a medical aesthetics clinic
Measured with the Redline Baseline Method: Search Console, July to September 2025 against the same months of 2026. Past results don't predict future results; yours depend on your market, competition and starting point. See the case studies.
SEO statistics, answered.
What percentage of Google searches end without a click?
In early 2026, 63.8% of Google searches in Canada and 68% in the US ended without a click, according to SparkToro's analysis of Similarweb panel data. Many searchers get their answer on the results page, such as opening hours, a phone number or an AI summary.
Do AI Overviews reduce clicks to websites?
Yes, on average. Ahrefs found the top result's click rate was 58% lower than expected when an AI Overview appeared. Pew found people clicked a regular result on 8% of visits with an AI summary, against 15% without one.
How many people use ChatGPT?
OpenAI says more than 1.2 billion people use ChatGPT each week (October 2026). In Canada, 46% of adults online used a generative AI tool in the past year, according to CIRA.
Is SEO still worth it in 2026?
Yes: Google still sends about 56 times more website visits than all AI assistants combined (Ahrefs, September 2026). The same work, such as clear pages, reviews and mentions, can also help you get named in AI answers. Our SEO cost guide explains what it takes.
What percentage of Google searches are local?
Nobody outside Google knows. The widely quoted "46%" came from one attendee's tweet at a 2018 Google event, and we found no Google publication of it. What's measured is how people act: 97% of US consumers read reviews for local businesses (BrightLocal, 2026).
Can anyone guarantee a top ranking on Google?
No. Google's own guidance says no one can guarantee a #1 ranking, and it warns against SEOs who claim they can.
Can I use these statistics?
Yes. Please cite the original studies we link to, and link to this page if it helped. We update it when new data comes out.
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