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Showing Analysis posts · 49 articles
The 70% figure for AI traffic hiding in GA4's Direct channel comes from one vendor's dataset, and it's now credited to three different sources. We traced it, read the rival studies, and checked how six AI engines' links pass referrers on October 19, 2026.
Does an AI Overview citation bring more clicks or fewer? Seer Interactive's 2026 data says cited brands get about 120% more organic clicks than uncited ones, but 38% fewer than with no AI Overview. Why you'll also see 35% quoted, what Google and Pew say, and our check of 143 AI Overviews.
Google search statistics for 2026, traced to their sources: Google's own 5 trillion searches a year, about 13.7 billion a day, its 89.94% share, 68% zero-click searches and AI Mode's billion users. Plus our check of 15 ranking stats pages that quoted daily figures from 3.5 billion to 22 billion.
Is Google search shrinking? We pulled three years of US search volume for 230 keywords and lined it up with Alphabet's results, Statcounter and SparkToro. Searching held up. Clicking didn't, and 'best' searches split Google's own tools.
Bot traffic statistics for 2026 from Thales, Cloudflare and HUMAN: how much of the web is bots, how much is AI, what crawlers send back, plus our test of how the top 244 sites answer a request from GPTBot.
Generative AI statistics for 2026 from the Census Bureau, the St. Louis Fed, Gallup and Pew: how many people use it, at work and at home, what they use it for, how much time it saves, and a weekday test of when people search for each AI tool.
Microsoft Copilot statistics for 2026 from Microsoft's earnings calls, Statcounter, Similarweb and Google search data: paid seats, GitHub Copilot users, Bing's reach, Copilot's share of AI referrals and what it means for your site.
Search engine market share in 2026 from Statcounter and Cloudflare Radar data: Google, Bing, Yandex, Baidu and Naver by country and device, plus how ChatGPT and the other AI engines compare with Google.
Perplexity statistics for 2026 from Statcounter, Similarweb, Reuters and Perplexity's CEO: revenue, valuation, queries, web traffic share, referral share by country and device, and what the numbers mean for your site.
LLM statistics for 2026 from a fresh pull of 465 models: how many exist, what they cost per million tokens, how big their context windows are, which ones developers actually use, and what people ask them to do.
The most popular AI tools in 2026 ranked four ways: Google search demand for 40 tools over 12 months, browser extension installs, visits and app users for chatbots, and the apps developers run most.
AI statistics for 2026, checked against their sources: who uses AI, what it pays companies, what marketers do with it and how it changes search, plus the 2017-era numbers that still fill Google's results.
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