GEO and AEO statistics (2026)

This page collects 99 statistics on generative engine optimization (GEO) and answer engine optimization (AEO), the work of getting a brand named and cited in ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and Google's AI answers. Each figure links to the study, survey or company announcement it comes from, with its year and sample. Two sections use Rank.ai's own data from 11,726 AI answers. For usage and adoption of the engines themselves, see our AI search statistics. For how to put these findings to work, read our generative engine optimization guide and the free LLM SEO tool.

Rank.ai data: how often AI answers name a business

Rank.ai analysed 11,726 fresh answers from ChatGPT (gpt-4o-mini), Claude (claude-haiku-4-5) and Gemini (gemini-2.5-flash) with web search on, to 102 buyer questions tracked by 15 Rank.ai customer accounts, collected May 7 to October 16, 2026. Cached repeat answers are excluded, and the engines were queried through their APIs with Rank.ai's own web search tool.

• 61%of ChatGPT answers to buyer questions named no business at all, against 61.9% for Gemini and 63.4% for Claude.Rank.ai analysis of 11,726 AI answers, May to October 20262026
• 0is the median number of businesses per answer on every engine: answers either name none or name a list.Rank.ai analysis of 11,726 AI answers, May to October 20262026
• 22.2%of Claude answers named 5 or more businesses, against 21.7% for ChatGPT and 20.8% for Gemini.Rank.ai analysis of 11,726 AI answers, May to October 20262026
• 2.53businesses named per answer on average by Gemini, against 2.47 for Claude and 2.03 for ChatGPT.Rank.ai analysis of 11,726 AI answers, May to October 20262026
• 11.0%of Gemini answers named the tracking customer's own brand, against 8.1% for Claude and 6.4% for ChatGPT.Rank.ai analysis of 11,726 AI answers, May to October 20262026
• 7.5%of Gemini answers cited the customer's own website, against 4.5% for Claude and 3.7% for ChatGPT.Rank.ai analysis of 11,726 AI answers, May to October 20262026
• 96.3%of ChatGPT answers included at least one citation, against 94.4% for Gemini and 80.1% for Claude.Rank.ai analysis of 11,726 AI answers, May to October 20262026
• 7.38citations per answer on average from Gemini, against 6.34 for ChatGPT and 5.40 for Claude.Rank.ai analysis of 11,726 AI answers, May to October 20262026
• 2,139characters is ChatGPT's average answer length, against 1,706 for Claude and 1,666 for Gemini.Rank.ai analysis of 11,726 AI answers, May to October 20262026

Rank.ai data: which platforms AI cites and how it searches

The same 11,726 answers produced 74,761 citations. We publish the share for public platforms only, since the other cited sites reveal what customers track.

• 4.01%of all 74,761 citations went to Reddit, the most-cited site: 4.53% on Gemini, 3.74% on ChatGPT and 3.62% on Claude.Rank.ai analysis of 11,726 AI answers, May to October 20262026
• 2.09%of citations went to YouTube, 1.73% to LinkedIn, 0.87% to Facebook and 0.59% to Quora.Rank.ai analysis of 11,726 AI answers, May to October 20262026
• 0.27%of ChatGPT citations went to Wikipedia, and under 0.3% on every engine (Gemini 0.10%, Claude 0.04%).Rank.ai analysis of 11,726 AI answers, May to October 20262026
• 1,230distinct sites were cited by Gemini across 28,925 citations, against 2,448 for ChatGPT and 2,577 for Claude: Gemini cites more often from fewer sites.Rank.ai analysis of 11,726 AI answers, May to October 20262026
• 11.7words is the average buyer question, but the searches the AIs ran averaged 6.5 words on ChatGPT and Claude and 5.1 on Gemini.Rank.ai analysis of 11,726 AI answers, May to October 20262026
• 100%of ChatGPT answers ran a web search, against 98.4% for Claude and 95.6% for Gemini, when search was available.Rank.ai analysis of 11,726 AI answers, May to October 20262026
• 8,711searches were run by ChatGPT, 7,789 by Claude and 3,749 by Gemini for roughly 3,900 answers each.Rank.ai analysis of 11,726 AI answers, May to October 20262026
• 12%of plumbers that AI assistants recommended in five cities were in the Google Maps top 10, and 16 of the Maps top-10 plumbers were named by any engine.loc.ai local AI index, October 20262026
• 1 in 18AI plumber picks (25 of 460) had no matching Google Maps listing: 7.7% on ChatGPT, 6.6% on Gemini, 5.3% on Perplexity and 0% on Claude.loc.ai local AI index, October 20262026

Marketer adoption and budgets

Enterprise budgets for AEO and GEO grew through 2025, but few brands measure the result. Conductor surveyed 250+ enterprise executives who own AEO, GEO or SEO; McKinsey surveyed 1,927 consumers for its AI discovery work.

• 94%of enterprises plan to increase AEO and GEO investment in 2026.Conductor, 2026 AEO/GEO CMO Investment Report2026
• 12%of digital marketing budgets went to AEO and GEO on average at enterprises in 2025.Conductor, 2026 AEO/GEO CMO Investment Report2026
• 97%of enterprise executives say AEO and GEO already drive a measurable positive impact on the funnel.Conductor, 2026 AEO/GEO CMO Investment Report2026
• 77%of content marketers create content mainly meant for LLMs to detect, reference or surface, in a survey of 459.Clutch and Conductor, 2026 State of Content Report2026
• 25%of content marketers, nearly, say LLMs are the primary audience for most of their content (32% at enterprises).Clutch and Conductor, 2026 State of Content Report2026
• 67%of content marketers see LLMs as more opportunity than risk, and 87% plan to increase content budgets in 2026.Clutch and Conductor, 2026 State of Content Report2026
• 22%of CMOs now start vendor research inside an LLM, against 16% with search engines, in 100 CMO interviews. 90% use LLMs daily.Profound and Listen Labs, CMO research2026
• 16%of brands systematically track AI search performance.McKinsey, New front door to the internet2025
• 44%of AI search users call it their primary source of insight, ahead of traditional search at 31% and brand sites at 9%.McKinsey, New front door to the internet2025
• $750 billionin US revenue will flow through AI-powered search by 2028, McKinsey forecasts, and unprepared brands could lose 20% to 50% of traffic from traditional search.McKinsey, New front door to the internet2025
• 80%of consumers rely on zero-click results in at least 40% of their searches, and Bain estimates this cuts organic web traffic by 15% to 25%.Bain, Goodbye clicks, hello AI2025
• 25%drop in traditional search engine volume by 2026 was Gartner's 2024 forecast, as chatbots and virtual agents take share.Gartner press release2024

How AI picks its sources

AI engines run their own searches and pick from the results, so Google rankings still matter, but less than many assume. The overlap figures differ because studies define "ranking" differently: top 10 blue links, all SERP blocks, or the top 100.

• 38%of URLs cited in Google AI Overviews also rank in the top 10; 31.2% rank at positions 11 to 100 and 31.0% below 100, across 863,000 SERPs.Ahrefs, AI Overview citations and the top 102026
• 76%of AI Overview citations came from the top 10 in Ahrefs' earlier 2025 study, before Gemini 3 took over AI Overviews.Ahrefs, AI Overview citations and the top 102025
• 58.4%of pages at the first slot of ChatGPT's own search results get cited, falling to 14.2% at slot 10, across 353,799 retrieved pages.AirOps and Kevin Indig, The fan-out effect2026
• 58%of pages ChatGPT retrieves in a search are never cited in the answer.AirOps and Kevin Indig, The fan-out effect2026
• 54.5%of AI Overview citations came from pages that rank organically by September 2025, up from 32.3% in May 2024, across nine industries.BrightEdge, AI Overview citations and organic rankings2025
• 75.3%of healthcare AI Overview citations overlap organic rankings, against 22.9% in ecommerce.BrightEdge, AI Overview citations and organic rankings2025
• 43%of position-1 URLs are cited in the AI Overview, falling to 31% at position 3 and 7% at position 20, in 362,000 US queries.seoClarity, AI Overviews and organic rankings overlap2025
• 94%of keywords have at least one AI Overview citation that ranks in the top 20.seoClarity, AI Overviews and organic rankings overlap2025
• 13.7%of cited URLs overlap between Google AI Mode and AI Overviews for the same query, though the answers are 86% semantically similar.Ahrefs, AI Overviews vs AI Mode2025
• 12%of links cited by ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot appear in Google's top 10 for the same prompt, across 15,000 long-tail prompts.Ahrefs, AI search overlap2025
• 28.6%of Perplexity's citations rank in Google's top 10, the highest of the assistants tested, against 8.0% for ChatGPT's in-text citations.Ahrefs, AI search overlap2025
• 15.69%of queries triggered an AI Overview in November 2025, down from a 24.61% peak in July, across 10 million+ keywords.Semrush, AI Overviews study2025

Query rewriting and fan-out

Before it cites anything, an AI engine turns a question into one or more web searches. Rank.ai's data above shows an 11.7-word question becoming a 5 to 6.5 word search; these studies measure the same step at larger scale.

• 14.4%of ChatGPT responses, about 1 in 7, triggered a web search, across 66.6 million free logged-out responses in August and September 2026.Ahrefs, How ChatGPT does query fan-out2026
• 1.6fan-out queries on average per ChatGPT response that searched, from 15 million fan-outs.Ahrefs, How ChatGPT does query fan-out2026
• 6.8%of ChatGPT fan-out queries use the site: operator, and 75.9% of the top site: targets are brand websites.Ahrefs, How ChatGPT does query fan-out2026
• 22.9%of ChatGPT fan-outs contained "2026" in September, up from 17.6% in August; "price" rose from 6.0% to 8.9%.Ahrefs, How ChatGPT does query fan-out2026
• 84.4%of ChatGPT answers to factual brand questions cited at least one official source, against 68.3% for comparison questions.Ahrefs, How ChatGPT does query fan-out2026
• 57.1%of queries that triggered AI Overviews were informational in October 2025, down from 91.3% in January, as Overviews spread to commercial searches.Semrush, AI Overviews study2025

Citation patterns: which sites AI cites

Reddit, YouTube, Wikipedia and LinkedIn top most citation studies, but their shares swing month to month as engines change. Compare them with the Rank.ai platform shares above.

• 88%drop in Reddit's citation rate in US ChatGPT answers between March and September 2026, from about 1 in 5 answers to 1 in 43; Wikipedia fell 80%.Ahrefs, How ChatGPT does query fan-out2026
• 23.3%of AI Overview citations went to YouTube, the top domain, followed by Wikipedia at 18.4%, across 46 million citations from March to August 2025.Surfer, AI citation report2025
• 60%of ChatGPT responses cited Reddit in early August 2025, falling to about 10% by mid-September, in 230,000+ prompts.Semrush, Most-cited domains in AI2025
• 15%of Google AI Mode responses cite LinkedIn, its most-cited domain in the same study.Semrush, Most-cited domains in AI2025
• 47.9%of ChatGPT's citations to its top 10 sources went to Wikipedia (7.8% of all its citations), across 680 million citations.Profound, AI platform citation patterns2025
• 46.7%of Perplexity's citations to its top 10 sources went to Reddit (6.6% of all its citations).Profound, AI platform citation patterns2025
• 86%of AI citations for local and brand queries come from sources brands control, such as websites (44%) and listings (42%); forums like Reddit make up about 2%, across 6.8 million citations.Yext, AI citations research2025
• 48.7%of OpenAI's local citations come from listings, while Gemini favours websites at 52.1%.Yext, AI citations research2025
• 1 in 100or less is the chance ChatGPT or Google's AI returns the same brand list twice in 100 runs; the same order is about 1 in 1,000, across 2,961 runs.SparkToro and Gumshoe, AI brand recommendation consistency2026
• 30%of brands stayed visible in back-to-back AI responses, and 20% from the first run to the fifth, across 800 queries.AirOps, Citations and mentions in AI search2025
• 60%+of AI search answers misidentified the source of a news excerpt across eight tools; Perplexity was wrong 37% of the time and Grok 3 94%.Columbia Journalism Review, Tow Center2025
• 154of 200 Grok 3 citations in the same test led to error pages.Columbia Journalism Review, Tow Center2025

What correlates with being cited

Mentions of a brand across the web track AI visibility far more closely than links do. Fresh pages, headings that match the question, and "best of" lists also help; schema on its own showed no measurable lift in a controlled test. More on links in our backlink statistics.

• 0.664correlation between branded web mentions and AI Overview brand visibility, the strongest factor; Domain Rating scored 0.326, referring domains 0.295 and backlinks 0.218, across 75,000 brands.Ahrefs, AI Overview brand visibility factors2025
• 10xmore AI Overview mentions for brands in the top quarter by web mentions (about 169 on average) than for the next quarter (14).Ahrefs, AI Overview brand visibility factors2025
• 40%more likely to resurface across runs: brands that were both cited and mentioned in an answer, compared with brands that were only cited.AirOps, Citations and mentions in AI search2025
• +2.2%change in ChatGPT citations after adding JSON-LD schema, statistically no different from zero, in 1,885 treated pages against 4,000 controls; AI Overviews moved by minus 4.6%.Ahrefs, Does schema help AI citations?2026
• 41%citation rate when a page's best heading closely matches the query, against 30.2% for weak matches.AirOps and Kevin Indig, The fan-out effect2026
• 34.3%citation rate for pages of 500 to 999 words, the best length band; pages over 5,000 words fell to 28.6%.AirOps and Kevin Indig, The fan-out effect2026
• 25.7%fresher: pages cited by AI assistants average 1,064 days old, against 1,432 for Google's organic results, across 16.975 million cited URLs.Ahrefs, AI assistants prefer to cite fresher content2025
• 85%of AI Overview citations were published from 2023 to 2025, against about 80% for Perplexity and 71% for ChatGPT, in 5,000+ URLs.Seer Interactive, AI brand visibility and content recency2025
• 43.8%of pages ChatGPT cited for "best X" prompts were "best X" list posts, across 26,283 source URLs.Ahrefs, Do self-promotional best lists boost ChatGPT visibility?2025
• 79.1%of the "best" lists ChatGPT cited had been updated in 2025.Ahrefs, Do self-promotional best lists boost ChatGPT visibility?2025
• 30% to 40%relative visibility gain in generative engine answers from citing sources, adding quotations or adding statistics; keyword stuffing scored below baseline, across 10,000 queries.Aggarwal et al., GEO: Generative Engine Optimization2024
• 115.1%visibility gain from citing sources for sites ranked fifth, while sites ranked first lost 30.3% with the same edit.Aggarwal et al., GEO: Generative Engine Optimization2024

Reviews and local AI recommendations

For local businesses, ratings and listings decide much of what AI recommends. See our online review statistics and local SEO statistics for the wider picture.

• 45%of US consumers used ChatGPT or other AI tools for local business recommendations, up from 6% a year earlier, in a survey of 1,002.BrightLocal, Local Consumer Review Survey 20262026
• 1.2%of brand locations are recommended by ChatGPT, against a 35.9% average Google 3-Pack appearance rate, across 350,000+ locations.SOCi, 2026 Local Visibility Index2026
• 4.3stars is the average rating of the locations ChatGPT recommends.SOCi, 2026 Local Visibility Index2026
• 4.76 to 4.83is the average Google rating of plumbers that ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity picked in five cities, across 460 picks.loc.ai local AI index, October 20262026
• 1,097is the median Google review count of Claude's plumber picks, against 1,055 for Perplexity, 736 for Gemini and 713 for ChatGPT.loc.ai local AI index, October 20262026
• 151of 226 recommended plumbers were named by one engine only; 13 were named by all four.loc.ai local AI index, October 20262026

AI referral traffic and conversion

AI engines still send a small share of website visits, about 1 in 100, but that share is growing fast and the visitors convert well. For click loss from Google's AI answers, see our zero-click search statistics.

• 1.08%of all website traffic came from AI referrals, about 1 in 100 visits, across 3.3 billion sessions on 1,215 enterprise domains from May to September 2025.Conductor, 2026 AEO/GEO Benchmarks Report2026
• 87.4%of AI referral traffic came from ChatGPT on average in the same data.Conductor, 2026 AEO/GEO Benchmarks Report2026
• 770.7 millionAI referral visits a month on average went to websites worldwide from June 2025 to May 2026, up 117.4% year over year.Similarweb, AI referral traffic by industry2026
• 6.8%of US ChatGPT prompts contained a citation by May 2026, up from about 1.6% in June 2025.Similarweb, AI search stats 20262026
• 693.4%year-over-year growth in AI traffic to US retail sites in the 2025 holiday season, across 1 trillion+ retail visits.Adobe, 2025 holiday shopping season2026
• 1.66%of LLM referrals converted to a sign-up, against 0.15% from search, 0.13% from direct and 0.46% from social, across 1,277 publisher and news domains.Microsoft Clarity, AI traffic converts at 3x the rate of other channels2025
• 4.4xthe value of a traditional organic visitor, by conversion rate, is Semrush's estimate for the average AI search visitor, from a projection across 500+ marketing and SEO topics.Semrush, AI search and SEO traffic study2025
• 23xthe conversion rate of organic visitors for AI search visitors on ahrefs.com: 0.5% of its traffic produced 12.1% of sign-ups, on one site.Ahrefs, AI search traffic conversions2025
• 1,091pages were crawled by OpenAI for every visit it referred in July 2025, against 38,066 for Anthropic and 195 for Perplexity.Cloudflare, The crawl-to-click gap2025
• 8%of Google visits with an AI summary led to a click on a traditional result, against 15% without one, in 68,879 searches by 900 US adults; 1% clicked a link inside the summary.Pew Research Center2025
• 58%lower average click-through rate for the top-ranking page when an AI Overview appears, Ahrefs estimates from 300,000 keywords.Ahrefs, AI Overviews reduce clicks by 58%2026
• 35%higher organic click-through rate and 91% higher paid click-through rate for brands cited in an AI Overview than for brands not cited.Seer Interactive, AIO impact on Google CTR2025

The AI visibility tool market

Investors put several hundred million dollars into AI visibility software in 2025 and 2026, and larger marketing software companies bought in. Figures are as each company or report states them.

• $180 millionSeries D at a $1.8 billion valuation was raised by Profound in September 2026, co-led by Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins.Profound press release2026
• $96 millionSeries C at a $1 billion valuation was raised by Profound in February 2026, led by Lightspeed.Profound press release2026
• $35 millionSeries B was raised by Profound in August 2025, led by Sequoia, for $58.5 million in total funding at the time.Profound, PR Newswire2025
• $1.9 billionin cash is what Adobe agreed to pay for Semrush, citing its GEO and SEO products.Semrush newsroom2025
• $225 millionis the reported price of Sitecore's acquisition of Scrunch; Sitecore did not disclose terms.TechTarget, reporting Bloomberg2026
• $43 millionSeries B was raised by Bluefish in April 2026, co-led by Threshold Ventures and NEA, for $68 million in total.Gunderson Dettmer client announcement2026
• $21 millionSeries A was raised by Peec AI in November 2025, led by Singular, after onboarding about 1,300 brands and agencies since February 2025.Tech.eu2025
• $15 millionSeries A was raised by Evertune in August 2025, led by Felicis.Evertune press release2025
• $15 millionSeries A was raised by Scrunch in July 2025, led by Decibel, with 500+ brands using it at the time.Scrunch release via MarTech Series2025

What this means for your GEO and AEO work

• Track answers, one question at a time. Answers vary run to run, so measure over many runs. Start with the free AI grade to see whether ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini name your business.
• Earn mentions on the sites AI reads. Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn and "best of" lists show up in every citation study. Our guide to AI SEO tools covers how to monitor them.
• Write for the short search. AIs turn an 11.7-word question into a 5 to 6.5 word search. Match headings to those searches and keep pages fresh.
• Keep listings and reviews current. Local AI picks average 4.3 to 4.8 stars, and listings are the largest citation source for OpenAI's local answers. See Google reviews for business and NAP consistency.
• Keep ranking in Google. Organic rankings still feed most AI Overview citations; see our AI Overviews statistics and ChatGPT statistics.

Sources and method

Rank.ai's own figures come from 11,726 fresh answers by ChatGPT (gpt-4o-mini), Claude (claude-haiku-4-5) and Gemini (gemini-2.5-flash) with web search on, to 102 buyer questions tracked by 15 Rank.ai customer accounts, collected May 7 to October 16, 2026, with cached repeats excluded; the questions are mostly B2B software, fintech, SEO, marketing and local services, so shares will differ in other categories. Engines were queried through their APIs with Rank.ai's own search tool, so they reflect the models behind the apps. Local figures come from the loc.ai local AI index (60 answers, 460 picks, verified against Google Maps). Everything else links to the primary study, survey or company announcement, with vendor studies named with their sample. Funding figures are as announced or reported. Every figure and link was checked on 2026-10-16.