AI Search Statistics You Need to Know [2025]

Discover the AI search statistics shaping SEO and marketing, covering user behavior, LLM trends, industry insights, and the future of AI-powered discovery.

by: Daria Erzakova
Published: October 21, 2025

If you’re like us (a bunch of search nerds always on the hunt for information), you’ve probably read dozens of articles covering AI search: monthly active user data, AI search vs. traditional search stats, data on industry-specific user behavior, and more.

We’ve amassed our own little library of AI search statistics at this point, and we thought the best thing we could do with that data is to aggregate it (along with our own original research) and put it out there for others to reference; you’re welcome in advance.

Without further ado, let’s get into it.

The Rise of AI Search

Before we break it down by LLM, industry, and make our predictions for the future, we would be remiss not to look at the state of AI search as a whole. After all, it’s still a fairly new concept for most, and these statistics could help you contextualize some of the more specific insights we’ll cover in this article.

• Recently, OpenAI’s Sam Altman stated that ChatGPT sees 800 million weekly active users.
• When we talk about conversion rates from AI search, we can cite a July study from Semrush, which found that the average AI search visitor is worth 4.4x more than a visitor from traditional organic search.
• The same study found that 50% of the links that appear in ChatGPT’s responses include business or service websites (that’s where you want to be). But how?
• In our domain-level study across LLMs ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity, we found that Wikipedia, Reddit, Quora, and Reuters led in “citation share,” highlighting that a handful of domains dominate AI’s “memory.”

Do you see what we’re getting at here? AI search is dominating the younger demographic, with ChatGPT often being listed as the most used LLM. It’s no wonder that businesses are scrambling to figure out how to be cited in ChatGPT’s synthesized answers.

User Behavior in AI Search

What about from the user’s end? How does AI search impact their search behavior? Which platforms do they choose?

• A study by the Capgemini Research Institute found that 73% of users trust the content that is generated by LLMs and generative AI tools.
• Across the search space, “ zero-click” behavior is accelerating; users can get answers without needing to click external links, especially for informational queries. So they don’t. 60% of searches now end without a click.
• Zooming in on the American market, Search Engine Land found that nearly 72% of Americans reported having used an AI tool, with 14% of them using these tools daily.
  • It should come as no surprise that Gen Z was the demographic with the highest adoption of AI tools.
• Though ChatGPT has the advantage of being first to market (and therefore first to capture early adopters), Gemini still has a fighting chance to dominate the AI search game due to its integration with Google.
  • Users are twice as unlikely to click on a result on a SERP that contains an AI Overview. They get the answer they need at their fingertips.

Market Share & Platform Statistics

We recently ran studies across several key industries: B2B SaaS, Finance, and Healthcare, as well as a non-industry specific study, to find which domains are being cited across the top-used LLMs. What we found was interesting, but not surprising.

• Across all LLM queries, the top 20 most cited domains make up almost 28% of all LLM citations. If we look at the top 50 domains, that number shoots up to 55%.
• Just 10 domains dominate the top citation spots across B2B SaaS, Finance, and Healthcare, though the 10 vary by industry.

AI Search Statistics for Finance

The finance industry is a prime case study for the following concept: your website likely won’t appear in LLM citations, but the places where your website is featured will.

• Our finance study found that NerdWallet emerged as the singular leader across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini; it’s cited in over 5% of AI searches.
  • This may not sound like much, but it’s more than spots 8-10 combined. And that’s just for the top 10 most cited domains.
• Due to the nature of the industry (and the prevalence of product-focused queries), affiliate articles and how-to guides dominate citations.

AI Search Statistics for B2B SaaS

Similar to what was found in the finance study, B2B SaaS showed that a single domain dominated the bulk of citations. The difference, however, was that the domain is not industry-specific like Nerdwallet. Rather, it was a social and UGC platform: Reddit.

• Over a third (35%) of citations for B2B SaaS-related queries come from 10 sources. This is true across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini.
• Reddit is the dominating force for B2B SaaS LLM citations; it holds the top spot for both ChatGPT and Perplexity (2nd for Claude and 6th in Gemini).
  • While the remainder of the domains cited were fairly similar across LLMs, there are a few standouts that could give B2B SaaS brands a competitive edge on certain platforms: CNET and LinkedIn.

AI Search Statistics for Beauty & Personal Care

Similar to B2B SaaS, Reddit was a dominating player in the beauty and personal care space. However, the trust stack looked a little different, with more retail and medical domains popping into the top 10 rather than a focus on social, UGC, and editorial content.

• Reddit, Sephora, Byrdie, and Allure appear across all tested AI models, signaling a high trust in those domains.
• Claude was found to focus more on medical and health information; an interesting turn of events, given Perplexity tends to be LLM that users turn to for more scientific or research-based queries.

The Future of AI Search (2025 & Beyond)

To understand the future of AI search through numbers and statistics, one must first look at it through the lens of user and brand behavior. What are we doing on the internet that will shape the future of AI search, and how are major players in the space moving?

• Perplexity and OpenAI have released search engines Comet and Operator; as marketers, this signals to us that paid search will likely extend out to AI search engines, further mirroring the marketing mix of traditional search in the AI space.
• Goodie’s AEO Periodic Table research found that up to 30% of informational queries are already bypassing traditional search in favor of AI interfaces.
• In terms of total usership, Statista projects that there will be approximately 950 million people worldwide using AI tools by 2030 (up from ~346 million at the end of 2025).
• We’ve also seen a trend of AI becoming the default (think Google pushing AI Mode as the first method of searching). Adoption has the potential to quickly reach majority user penetration across developed markets.
• Though multimodal search is already prevalent, we’ll likely see AI Overviews and conversational search continue to integrate more deeply with voice, image, and other multimodal queries.

Now, while we can’t necessarily give exact statistics for the future of AI search, we can apply the current trends to make educated guesses about what the landscape will look like in one year, five years, and even 10 years from now:

• The global AI search engine market is projected to grow from $18.5B (USD) in 2025 to $66.2B by 2035, a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of about 14%.
• By 2027, a whopping 25% of organizations are projected to leverage custom AI chatbots as one of their primary consumer communication channels.
• Marking an exponential increase in the speed of globalization (which was first set off by the adoption of the internet), 44% of Statista survey respondents would realistically use ChatGPT to generate content in different languages.

AI Tools for Finding & Analyzing Statistics

Along with the increasing adoption of AI search and its market value skyrocketing come the tools marketers (and analysts) need to give color and context to the behaviors we see.

• Goodie itself surfaces domain-level citation data for brands, working across LLMs to uncover AI search insights and optimization opportunities.
• Tools like Statista, GWI, and Exploding Topics aggregate market and usage data across AI and tech trends.
• For industry-specific AI tools:
  • Finance
    • AlphaSense → AI-powered market intelligence and financial document search.
    • Sentieo → Combines financial data, documents, and AI search for investment research.
    • FactSet AI Search → Helps analysts surface structured + unstructured insights faster.
  • Healthcare
    • IBM Watson Discovery for Healthcare → AI-driven document and clinical search.
    • HealthVerity → Tracks healthcare data with AI-enhanced search and visibility.
    • Komodo Health Map → Real-world patient data discovery and AI-based trend analysis.
  • Consumer Products (D2C / Retail / CPG)
    • Similarweb AI Insights → Tracks consumer demand, search visibility, and competitive benchmarks.
    • NielsenIQ Discover → AI search across retail and e-commerce product performance.
    • RetailNext → AI-powered analytics for consumer behavior and product visibility.
  • B2B SaaS
    • G2 Buyer Intent + AI Search → Surfaces SaaS visibility and category trends.
    • Crayon → Competitive intelligence and AI-driven search tracking for SaaS markets.
    • Clearbit → AI-enhanced company search + enrichment for go-to-market visibility.

These trustworthy sources offer both macro and micro views of AI’s impact on search and visibility.

Final Thoughts

Wake up and rub the keyword research dashboards out of the insides of your retinas, SEOs; AI search is no longer an experimental side channel: it’s a central force redefining how people find answers and how brands earn visibility.

The statistics we covered in this article show a few truths: authority is consolidating, brands must fight for inclusion, and domain citations matter more than ever. A note to brands: your best bet isn’t just ranking on Google; it’s being remembered, trusted, and cited by the systems people increasingly rely on.

Use the data, get strategic, and make your content part of the answer.

AI Search Statistics FAQs

How reliable is AI search?

It depends on the query and the user input (i.e., proper prompt engineering). Many users trust AI for quick summaries (think Google’s AI Overview), but models can hallucinate. Domain authority, citations, and cross-model consistency are crucial for reliability.

How to get AI search results?

Depending on where you’re searching, this could look a little different between platforms.

• Use conversational, full-question prompts in tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity.
• Google an informational query, and you should get an AI Overview summarizing the answer; if not, give AI Mode a try!

What are the statistics of AI SEO?

• Goodie’s AEO Periodic Table lists 15 factors influencing AI search visibility.
• In B2B SaaS, 35% of AI citations come from just 10 domains.
• In Beauty & Personal Care, the top 10 domains capture 36.7% of AI citations.
• In Consumer Finance, the top 10 domains account for 27.8% of AI citations.