The state of SEO in 2026

SEO in October 2026 works much as it did before AI search, but on searches that show an AI Overview, people click through to websites about 40% less often [2][3]. Google builds AI Overviews and AI Mode from the same index and ranking systems as its ordinary results, and its own guide for site owners calls optimizing for them "still SEO" [1]. The 40% comes from the one randomized experiment so far.

AI assistants such as ChatGPT have also become a second route to a site. For most sites it still brings a small share of visits, and each assistant has its own crawlers and its own controls.

Disclosure: we make Simple Web Audit, an SEO audit tool, and describe one of its design decisions in the section on keeping your site out of AI answers. Several studies come from companies that sell SEO or AI-visibility tools, and we name them as we go.

How many people use AI search?

Billions of people see AI answers in search each month, according to the latest figures each company has published:

All four are the companies' own figures, and none of them defines a user. In May 2026 Google joined AI Overviews and AI Mode into one experience, so you can ask a follow-up question from an AI Overview and carry on in AI Mode. It did not make AI Mode the default results page: "You'll continue to get a range of results from Search, just like you do today." [5]

In OpenAI's study of consumer ChatGPT use, seeking information grew from 14% to 24% of use between July 2024 and July 2025, and the authors say it "appears to be a very close substitute for web search" [8]. In a February 2026 Pew Research Center survey of 5,119 US adults, 42% said they use chatbots to search for information [9].

Most searching still happens on Google: StatCounter, which counts the visits search engines send to the sites it tracks, put Google at 89.94% worldwide in September 2026 [10]. AI chatbots sent 0.4% of the visits StatCounter recorded from search, social media and chatbots combined [11]. In 2024 Gartner predicted that traditional search engine volume would fall 25% by 2026 [12]. We found no data showing a fall that size, and Google says AI Mode is "driving an incremental increase in Search queries overall" [13].

Are AI answers taking clicks from websites?

AI answers take clicks from websites on the searches where they appear. Every independent study we found shows fewer clicks when an AI Overview sits at the top of the results, while Google says the total number of clicks it sends has held steady.

The randomized experiment is the strongest design, because it compares the same kind of searches with and without an AI Overview. It is a working paper, not yet peer reviewed, and the paper's own page blocked our requests, so we rely on the two reports of it. Ahrefs sells SEO tools and Seer sells SEO services; Ahrefs compared keywords over time rather than running a test, and Seer says it cannot claim the AI Overviews caused either change. SparkToro's two years come from different data panels.

In August 2025 Google's head of Search, Liz Reid, wrote that "total organic click volume from Google Search to websites has been relatively stable year-over-year" [18], and in July 2026 Google said its AI features send "billions of clicks to websites every week" [13]. Google has not published the data behind either statement. Fewer clicks per search can still add up to a steady total if people search more, so both claims can be true at once, and a steady total can still hide large losses for some sites.

In its early-2026 report, Chartbeat, which measures traffic for news and media publishers, found that smaller sites lost the most search traffic: down 60% for small publishers, 47% for mid-sized ones and 22% for large ones [19]. The report's table labels them year-on-year changes. Those are news and media sites; we found no study that measures clicks to small business websites.

Pew found AI summaries on 53% of searches of ten words or more, against 8% of one- or two-word searches [14], so pages that answer a longer, general question are the most exposed. In Search Console (Google Search Console, Google's free report on how your site appears in search), compare this year's clicks and impressions with last year's for your question-style pages. Steady impressions with falling clicks are what you would expect to see if an AI Overview is now answering that question.

Do AI answers appear when people look for a local business?

AI Overviews appear on local searches less often than on general questions, and when they do appear, they rely heavily on business listings. Ahrefs found them on 7.9% of local searches in September 2025, against 20.5% of all the searches it checked [20]. In a study published in May 2025, Whitespark, a local SEO company, ran 540 searches across six trades in three US cities. AI Overviews appeared on 15% of searches to find a business, but on 92% of informational questions about the same trades [21]. Both studies are from 2025; we found nothing newer at that scale.

Google says its AI answers can include "information about local businesses" and names Google Business Profile as one way to appear in them [1]. Business Profiles made up 28.5% of all the sources cited by ChatGPT, AI Mode and AI Overviews across about 200,000 local searches tracked by BrightLocal [22]. ChatGPT leans on Yelp, which appeared as a source in 80% of its local answers in another BrightLocal study [23]. Yelp told investors in August 2026 that its "ratings and reviews recently began powering ChatGPT's local experience in relevant categories" [24]. BrightLocal sells a tool that tracks AI visibility.

In a 2026 BrightLocal survey of 1,227 US consumers who had recently searched for a local business, 52% started that search on Google Search and 9% on Google Maps. Among people already using AI for local searches, only 18% felt ready to contact a business an AI tool recommended, and most went back to Google or another channel to check before deciding [25].

For a local business, the work that matters is the same as before AI search: a Business Profile with the right categories, hours and services; listings you have claimed and checked on Yelp and Apple Maps; and the same name, address and phone number on your site and everywhere else. The share of consumers who read reviews on Apple Maps rose from 14% to 27% in a year, according to BrightLocal's 2026 review survey [26].

Which pages do AI answers cite?

Most pages cited in AI Overviews do not rank in the organic top 10, and ranking first gives a page roughly a one-in-four chance of being cited. Google's AI features draw on Google's own index, so a page has to be indexed and eligible to show a text snippet before it can be cited [1]. Across 168 million AI Overview citations in the US from June to August 2026, the SEO software company Conductor found that 43% came from pages in the organic top 10, and that a page ranked first was cited in the AI Overview 24.9% of the time, falling to 10.2% at position ten [27].

ChatGPT search shows only sites its crawler, OAI-SearchBot, is allowed to reach [28], and Microsoft says Copilot uses the same crawling and index as Bing [29]. The engines cite different sites: in June 2025, only 7 of the 50 sites most often mentioned by Google's AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity appeared in all three lists [30].

Across 75,000 brands, Ahrefs found that mentions of a brand elsewhere on the web correlated more strongly with appearing in AI Overviews than backlinks did (0.664 against 0.218) [31]. The study covered only larger sites and measured correlation only, and Google warns that "seeking inauthentic "mentions" across the web isn't as helpful as it might seem." [1]

The evidence for rewriting pages to please AI models is weak. The 2023 paper that coined the term generative engine optimization found that adding citations, quotations and statistics raised a page's visibility by 30–40% on one of the authors' own measures, using a test engine built on GPT-3.5 [32]. A benchmark presented at NeurIPS 2025 found most published rewriting methods "largely ineffective" and often harmful, with the gains shrinking as more competitors used them [33].

In practice, that means ranking in Google and Bing, and being mentioned honestly where your customers already look: review sites, local press, industry directories and "best of" lists you have earned a place on.

What is AEO, and does a small site need it?

AEO (answer engine optimization) and GEO (generative engine optimization) are names for work aimed at being cited in AI answers. Google treats it as the same work as SEO:

The same guide says you don't need new machine-readable files, AI text files or special markup, or to break your content into small chunks, and that "there's no special schema.org markup you need to add" [1]. One such file, llms.txt, gets almost no use: in May 2026 server logs from 137,000 sites, Ahrefs found that 97% of llms.txt files received no requests at all [34]. We publish one on this site because it takes a minute to keep accurate, and we don't expect it to do anything in Google; our llms.txt assessment covers who does request the file.

Since May 2026 Google's spam policies name "attempting to manipulate generative AI responses in Google Search" as spam [35], and its guide says that creating pages for every variation of a question, mainly to manipulate AI responses, violates its scaled content abuse policy [1]. Bing's guidelines add: "SEO does not guarantee rankings or traffic, and GEO does not guarantee grounding or citations in AI experiences." [29]

If someone offers you an AEO package built on llms.txt, "AI schema" or hundreds of near-identical question pages, ask them which Google or Bing documentation says it helps.

Can you keep your site out of AI answers?

Since 31 August 2026 any site can opt out of Google's AI features with a Search Console setting, and each AI assistant names crawlers you can block in robots.txt (the file that tells crawlers which pages they may fetch).

Google's setting removes a site from AI Overviews, AI Mode and the AI features in Discover, and Google lists the cost: "You won't receive any traffic or impressions from these features." [36] Google says the setting is not used as a ranking signal elsewhere in Search, and that it does not affect AI training, which you control separately with Google-Extended. Other sites' content will still appear in those answers, so opting out does not take the question away from your competitors. The setting applies to a whole Search Console property, not to single pages [36].

On 3 June 2026 the UK's Competition and Markets Authority required Google to give publishers "effective tools to prevent their content being used to power AI features in search" [37]. The UK rule covers results shown in the UK [37]; Google offers the setting worldwide. US courts have not forced a change: on 30 September 2026 Judge Amit Mehta dismissed antitrust suits by Penske Media and Chegg over AI Overviews, writing that "an expectation is not an agreement. It is simply how a general search engine works." [38]

For AI products outside Google Search, robots.txt is the control, and most companies use one crawler for search and a different one for collecting training data:

For Copilot, Bingbot is the crawler that matters, and Bing says a NOARCHIVE tag keeps a page's content out of Copilot answers [29]. Perplexity, Amazon, Meta and DuckDuckGo run crawlers of their own; our guide to AI crawlers lists them and shows how to check which can reach your site.

Our audit reports a robots.txt rule that blocks a search crawler such as Bingbot or OAI-SearchBot as an issue, and lists rules for training crawlers and for user-triggered fetchers such as ChatGPT-User without a warning: opting out of training leaves search alone, and OpenAI says that for its user fetcher "robots.txt rules may not apply" [28]. It reads the file only; it does not test whether a firewall lets each crawler through.

Check your CDN settings as well as the file. Cloudflare, which sells bot controls, began asking new domains whether to allow AI crawlers in July 2025 [43]; since September 2026 its Block settings can stop Googlebot and Bingbot too, and it says fewer than 1% of its sites block search crawlers, while 17% block training [44].

For a business that wants new customers, we think opting out of Google's AI features rarely makes sense. It suits a publisher whose page is itself the answer, such as a recipe or a reference table, and who would rather lose the AI traffic than have the page summarized.

How can you see your AI search traffic?

Google and Bing now report some AI visibility, and Google Analytics labels visits from AI assistants, but no tool yet shows clicks from Google's AI answers on their own.

Search Console counts clicks and impressions from AI Overviews and AI Mode inside its normal Performance report, under the "Web" search type, without separating them [39]. Its Generative AI performance report, available to every site since 31 August 2026, shows impressions in those features but no clicks [45]. The UK regulator requires Google to report clicks and click-through rates for its AI features by 3 December 2026 [46].

Google Analytics 4 has had an "AI Assistant" channel since May 2026 for visits from sources such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot; it excludes Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, which stay in organic search [47]. Bing Webmaster Tools added an AI Performance report in February 2026 that shows how often Copilot and Bing's AI summaries cite your pages [48]. Bing says a citation "does not represent traffic, clicks, or user engagement" [49].

For most sites, AI assistants still send a small share of visits. Conductor measured 1.08% of all traffic across 10 industries in 2025 [50], and BrightEdge put AI platforms at 1.9% of search referrals in August 2026 [51]; both sell SEO software and measured their customers' sites. Adobe, which sells analytics software, found that AI-referred visits to US retail sites converted 42% better than other traffic in March 2026 [52].

Google's guide says "No third-party tool has access to our internal ranking or AI systems." [1] A tool that reports your AI rankings is recording the answers to a sample of prompts it chose.

What should you do now?

• Confirm Google can index the pages that matter. Each should return a normal page (HTTP status 200) and not be blocked by robots.txt [53]; the URL Inspection tool in Search Console shows whether a page is indexed.
• Open robots.txt and your CDN's bot settings. Allow the search crawlers you want to appear in, and decide about training crawlers separately.
• Check every detail in your Business Profile, claim your Yelp and Apple Maps listings, and use the same name, address and phone number everywhere.
• Put on your pages what only you can say: your prices, the areas you serve, how you do the work, photos of real jobs. Google's guide asks for "non-commodity" content [1].
• Ask customers for reviews. Google says "More reviews and positive ratings can help your business's local ranking." [54]
• Once a month, look at the Generative AI report in Search Console and the AI Assistant channel in Analytics.
• Skip llms.txt projects, "AI schema" and pages written for every phrasing of a question.

If you run a local business and do one thing this month, open your Business Profile and correct anything out of date: in BrightLocal's study it was the source behind 28.5% of the citations in AI answers about local businesses [22].