The numbers tell a stark story
Just over a year ago, Similarweb reported that Google’s AI-generated search summaries — officially called AI Overviews — appeared in roughly 15% of all queries. Fast-forward to May 2026, and that figure has nearly tripled. According to the firm’s latest analysis, AI Overviews now show up in 43% of searches.
That’s not a gradual uptick. It’s a pivot. What began as a tentative AI layer on top of search results has become a core feature of the experience itself. Users are increasingly landing on pages where the first thing they see isn’t a list of blue links but a block of machine-written text that synthesizes information from across the web.
AI Mode is booming, too
Google’s more conversational AI Mode — a separate interface where users can ask follow-up questions and get multi-turn answers — is also growing fast. Similarweb data shows that AI Mode visits climbed from 126 million in June 2025 to 279 million by May 2026. That’s more than double in less than a year.
The average length of a Google search query has also crept upward. People are moving away from short, keyword-driven strings like “best coffee maker 2026” and toward longer, natural-language questions such as “What’s the best drip coffee maker for a household of four under $200?” The shift reflects a broader behavioral change: users are treating Google less as a directory and more as an oracle.
Publishers are losing out
For news sites, blogs, and content publishers, this trend is painful. AI Overviews often include citations — the report notes that the number of AI responses containing a citation has grown more than fivefold over the past year — but citations don’t always translate into clicks. Readers get their answer without ever leaving Google’s ecosystem.
Last year, Similarweb already flagged how devastating this was for news publishers. Now the picture is clearer: Google is becoming the destination, not just the gateway. Users spend more time on Google’s platform, and less time visiting the sites that produced the original information.
Some publishers have started fighting back. Cloudflare, the tech infrastructure company, introduced tools that let publishers block AI crawlers unless those AI companies pay for access through its marketplace. It’s a small but growing resistance movement.
ChatGPT is a mixed bag for referrals
Meanwhile, across the AI search landscape, ChatGPT shows a different pattern. As of May 2026, only 6.8% of U.S. desktop queries on ChatGPT included citations. That’s low, but some sectors fare better: travel, retail, and sports queries generate cited responses more frequently than, say, health or finance topics.
There is a glimmer of good news for publishers. After a May 7 search update, the proportion of ChatGPT desktop visits that landed on actual webpages more than doubled — from 25% in March 2026 to nearly 60% by May 30. That suggests that when blue links are made more prominent within AI-driven results, users do click through.
Still, the overall direction is clear. Google is transforming itself from a search engine into a self-contained answer engine. Whether users or publishers like it, AI search is becoming the default — and the era of the simple list of links is fading fast.
