Google AI search rapidly becoming standard: new data
Google/DeepMind
OpenAI
Similarweb
Cloudflare
According to a new Similarweb report, Google's AI Overviews have grown from 15% to 43% of search queries in a year. This is changing user behavior: they spend more time on Google formulating long natural queries. Publishers are losing traffic due to AI citations, though the share of responses with citations has increased fivefold.
Market analytics firm Similarweb has published a report showing that AI Overviews (AI-generated answers in Google search) grew from 15% to 43% of search queries over the year. Over the same period, visits to AI Mode increased from 126 million in June 2025 to 279 million in May 2026. The data suggests that Google is transforming from a gateway to the internet into a destination in its own right: users are replacing short keywords with long, natural conversational queries, and the average search session duration is growing. Publishers are not welcoming these changes, as they lose referral traffic due to AI citations that rarely lead to clicks. Cloudflare has introduced tools that allow blocking AI crawlers if they do not pay for access through its marketplace. Although the number of responses with citations has grown more than fivefold, only 6.8% of desktop ChatGPT queries contained citations as of May 2026. After the ChatGPT search update on May 7, the share of referral visits to web pages increased from 25% in March to nearly 60% by May 30, 2026, offering some hope to publishers.
Source: TechCrunch AI —
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