Updated July 10, 2026 · All comparisons
Original, first-party numbers on how AI assistants recommend brands, how fast buyers are moving to AI search, and how heavily AI crawlers read the web. Sampled July 13, 2026. Cite any statistic freely with attribution to "Agent Exchange" and a link to this page. Machine-readable: /ai-search-statistics.json.
| 3–6 | brands are typically named per AI buying answer — everyone else is invisible to that buyer |
| 2/5 | buyer questions mention Mailchimp in email-marketing answers (AI-visibility score 40/100) — even category leaders lose AI answers |
| 3/5 | buyer questions mention GAF in roofing answers (60/100), while HubSpot and Asana captured 5/5 in their categories |
| 12 | industries sampled show ~5 brands dominating each category's AI recommendations, from CRM to moving companies |
| 8,100 | US searches/month for "ai seo" |
| 4,400 | US searches/month for "generative engine optimization" |
| 2,400 | US searches/month for "ai seo tools" — rated LOW competition |
| +285% | year-over-year growth in searches for "ai visibility" |
| +81% | year-over-year growth in searches for "best ai seo tools" |
| 287 | AI-crawler hits per day recorded on a ~30-page niche site (our own network) |
| 142 | daily hits from BingBot alone — the crawler feeding ChatGPT search and Microsoft Copilot |
| 21–25 | daily hits each from GPTBot, ClaudeBot and Amazonbot on the same small site |
| 14 | daily fetches from Claude-User — real-time page fetches triggered by live human questions to an AI assistant |
| 92.4% | of standalone AI referral traffic flows through ChatGPT (up from ~84% in Dec 2025) — Similarweb |
| May 7, 2026 | ChatGPT began rendering brand names as clickable links inside answers; total referrals rose 157.7% week-over-week and homepage referrals +354.7% — industry analysis |
| 92% vs 40.6% | of marketers plan to optimize for AI search vs. those actually doing it — the execution gap — Omnibound GEO statistics |
| ~11% | domain overlap between ChatGPT and Perplexity citation sources — visibility on one engine does not transfer — Omnibound AI search statistics |
Engine sample: Agent Exchange live recommendation engine, 12 industries × 5 buyer questions, sampled July 13, 2026 — the same engine behind the free AI-visibility check. Search demand: Google Keyword Planner, July 2026, US. Crawler traffic: Cloudflare AI Crawl Control, 24-hour sample, July 13, 2026, agentexchange.work network. Snapshots, not longitudinal claims; AI answers vary by phrasing and date. Refreshed as new samples are taken.
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