Updated July 10, 2026 · All comparisons

AI Search & Recommendation Statistics — July 11, 2026

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 11, 2026. Cite any statistic freely with attribution to "Agent Exchange" and a link to this page. Machine-readable: /ai-search-statistics.json.

How AI assistants recommend brands (live engine sample)

3–6brands are typically named per AI buying answer — everyone else is invisible to that buyer
2/5buyer questions mention Mailchimp in email-marketing answers (AI-visibility score 40/100) — even category leaders lose AI answers
3/5buyer questions mention GAF in roofing answers (60/100), while HubSpot and Asana captured 5/5 in their categories
12industries sampled show ~5 brands dominating each category's AI recommendations, from CRM to moving companies

Buyer demand is moving to AI search (Google Keyword Planner)

8,100US searches/month for "ai seo"
4,400US searches/month for "generative engine optimization"
2,400US 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"

AI crawlers are reading the web at scale (first-party logs)

287AI-crawler hits per day recorded on a ~30-page niche site (our own network)
142daily hits from BingBot alone — the crawler feeding ChatGPT search and Microsoft Copilot
21–25daily hits each from GPTBot, ClaudeBot and Amazonbot on the same small site
14daily fetches from Claude-User — real-time page fetches triggered by live human questions to an AI assistant

Method & sources

Engine sample: Agent Exchange live recommendation engine, 12 industries × 5 buyer questions, sampled July 11, 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 11, 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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