The latest

Google’s AI-generated summaries now appear in nearly half of US searches measured by Similarweb, rising sharply as conversational search attracts more activity. The market intelligence firm’s 2026 Generative AI Landscape report put AI Overviews at 43% of searches, up from 15% a year earlier. The expansion brings generated answers deeper into conventional results, while sharpening debate over whether users still click through to publishers and other source websites.

Details

• Different measures: Similarweb estimated visits to AI Mode’s web experience rose from 126 million in June 2025 to 279 million in May 2026. Google separately said AI Mode exceeded one billion monthly users in May. Visits and users are different measures, and neither should be compared directly with the 43% Overview exposure rate.
• Search mechanics: AI Overviews place generated summaries inside standard results, whereas AI Mode supports longer questions and follow-ups. Google says its “query fan-out” method divides questions into subtopics, runs multiple searches and builds responses with supporting links. Users can move into AI Mode without losing the original query’s context.
• Longer queries: Similarweb recorded a 5.4% increase in average Google query length after AI Mode’s introduction, indicating greater use of natural-language prompts. Ethan Smith, chief executive of digital marketing firm Graphite, said users were adopting “a new, more natural way to search and discover.”
• Broader growth: Generative AI websites averaged 9.5 billion monthly visits between June 2025 and May 2026, up 70% year on year, Similarweb estimated. Monthly unique visitors rose 57% to 655 million, while application downloads climbed 58% to 4.4 billion. The figures cover services including ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity.
• Citations and clicks: Web citations appeared in 6.8% of ChatGPT responses in May 2026, up from about 1.3% in June 2025, based on measured US desktop activity. After ChatGPT’s May 7 search update, referrals rose 157.7% week over week and homepage referrals jumped 354.7%, although Similarweb did not establish the update as the sole cause.
• Publisher responses: Google added direct links, article suggestions, website previews and more prominent source references in May, but released no resulting click-through data. Cloudflare is separately testing Pay per Crawl, allowing participating sites to permit, block or charge authenticated AI crawlers through an HTTP 402 “Payment Required” response.

Background

Similarweb combines first-party analytics, anonymised device information, external partnerships and public web data to model traffic and behaviour. Its estimates are not direct counts from Google or OpenAI, and cited metrics cover different products, audiences and forms of activity.

What’s next

The next concrete indicator is whether Google publishes click-through data for its May source-link changes. Publishers will also track referral destinations and Cloudflare’s decision on whether to expand Pay per Crawl beyond its private beta.