The full ledger
Every entry in the record, newest first. Verified statistics and citation-behavior research on AI search: each claim links to a primary source, vendor interests are flagged in-line, and each number carries its measurement date. The methodology has the full rules.
October 2026
8 entries
- No. 035+7.5%vs-5.3%
Schema markup and AI answers: 0 lab pages, 1 Google slide, +7.5% and -5.3%
No AI lab documents reading JSON-LD. Google says it is not required, a Google slide shows it as AI Mode context, and the one university test splits two ways.
- No. 03437.9%vs31.0%
What actually gets a page into an AI answer: eight tactics, ranked by evidence
Eight commonly recommended ways to get cited by AI, ranked by how good the evidence is. One is documented, two are null results, the rest is correlation.
- No. 03311%vs47%
How to check whether AI engines cite you, without buying a tool
Provider documentation is enough to build a manual citation check. Five hits in 20 runs carry a 95% interval of 11% to 47%, which is our own arithmetic.
- No. 03268,879vs12,593
Pew's 1% counts 12,593 searches. The sentence quoting it says 68,000.
A Reuters Institute explainer of 13 October attaches Pew's 1% AI Overview click rate to over 68,000 searches. Pew's base is the 12,593 that produced a summary.
- No. 03193%vs92%
LinkedIn's VP quotes 93%. The report he cites prints 92%.
A LinkedIn marketing post cites 93% of the 24 most-cited articles. The Meltwater page it links prints 92%, which is 22 of 24. The studies under it disagree too.
- No. 03039.5%vs47.1%
39.5% and 47.1% describe the same test. One has the wrong denominator.
A crawler-block index reports that 39.5% of GPTBot bans go unenforced. The chart in its own README says 47.1%. The raw data file shows what changed underneath.
- No. 02960%vs68.01%
The release says 60%. The study it links says 68.01%.
A paid release headlines 60% of searches ending without a click. The SparkToro study its own report page links reports 68.01%, counted a different way.
- No. 02893 of 100vs63 of 100
One test says 93 of 100 brands. The study citing it says 63 of 100.
Ahrefs' branded AI Overviews study cites a 93-of-100 brand test and reports 63 of 100 from its own panel. Five published numbers, five denominators.
September 2026
8 entries
- No. 02794%vs51%
Three click-through ranges in one filing. The widest ran in neither story.
A 92-page federal filing gives three Microsoft click-through ranges. TechCrunch printed one number, TheWrap printed two ranges, and 51% to 94% ran nowhere.
- No. 02668.27%
584,107 llms.txt files. 68.27% templated. 22.56% contain no links.
Common Crawl analyzed 584,107 llms.txt files from its July 2026 crawl: 68.27% are templated, Wix alone is 41.34%, and 22.56% contain no links at all.
- No. 025+$14.6Mvs-$5.4M
Advertising up 2%. Then down 1%. The AI Overviews sentence survived.
People Inc. recast its 2025 fiscal year on 11 September. Advertising flips from a $14.6M increase to a $5.4M decrease. The AI Overviews line does not.
- No. 02412.6%to97%
One tracker says 100%. The other says 86%. Same feature, same August.
Search Engine Roundtable reported People Also Ask is nearly 100% AI-answered. The two datasets behind that one headline disagree by 14 points on August.
- No. 0232,601vs183
Two experts, one 8.2 million conversation sample, and the numbers 59,545 and 51
Microsoft's summary judgment filing prints both counts on one page. They measure different publishers at different thresholds, and the page never says so.
- No. 02247%vs22%
Two newspapers sued OpenAI and called it an answer engine
The Seattle Times and Newsday filed on 4 September. The phrase answer engines is theirs, and the 47 percent traffic figure traces to their own footnotes.
- No. 0215 d 15 h
AI Mode stopped showing citations. The reassuring quote was five days old
Gemini 3.8 Flash reached AI Mode on 2 September and citations vanished on top-of-funnel queries. The quote read as Google's answer predates the model.
- No. 02039.1%vs65.3%
Google showed AI Overviews on 39.1% of election queries and 65.3% of others
AlgorithmWatch used a DSA data-access right to run 4,480 Google queries. AI Overviews appeared on 39.1% of election searches, 65.3% of non-political ones.
August 2026
12 entries
- No. 0193vs1
Half of web traffic is non-human. Three Cloudflare numbers became one.
Cloudflare says more than 50% of internet traffic is non-human. An explainer read that as AI bots. Three Cloudflare percentages, three different denominators.
- No. 0182vs1
An SEC filing credits McKinsey for a 60% stat. The number is Bain's.
Change Agents Corporation's S-1/A sells a GEO product on two statistics credited to McKinsey. The report it links contains one. Bain published the other.
- No. 0173vs0
Cloudflare set four conditions for Googlebot. It names nobody who meets them.
Bot Preference Sync lets a mixed-use crawler keep search access on a training-disallowed site by meeting four disclosure conditions. Each is self-attested.
- No. 016-18.8ppvs+8.8pp
18.8 points lost, 8.8 recovered. Only one was measured cleanly.
A preregistered experiment on live Google Search put causal numbers on AI Mode and AI Overviews. Mid-study, a Google HTML change broke one arm of the test.
- No. 015150:1to227:1
179:1, 6,000:1, 50,000:1: three tools, one metric, no shared definition
Scrape-to-referral is the metric of the moment. TollBit, Microsoft Clarity and Cloudflare each publish a version of it, and none of them count the same thing.
- No. 01415to32
Generative engine optimization is in 47 SEC filings. Read the risk factors.
Generative engine optimization appears in 47 SEC filings from 19 companies. The most candid description of it comes from a company warning investors about it.
- No. 01396.37%
ChatGPT ads reached five more countries. The ad rarely buys the citation.
OpenAI launched ChatGPT Ads in five more countries. A 50,006-prompt study finds the advertiser absent from the answer's own sources 96.37% of the time.
- No. 01243%vs59%
AI Overviews out-trust TikTok. The headline number isn't in the report.
RTB House says US shoppers trust Google AI Overviews and ChatGPT at 43% each, ahead of every social platform. Its lead press-release stat is not in the report.
- No. 01122%vs1%
A publisher put AI Overviews in an SEC filing. Revenue fell 1%.
People Incorporated's Q2 8-K blames Google AI Overviews for a 22% Core Sessions decline. The same filing shows session-based revenue fell just 1%.
- No. 0105vs1
Cloudflare shipped an AI visibility score. It asks two models.
Cloudflare's AEO dashboard pairs real crawl and referral logs with a Citation Rate scored against Claude and GPT only, computed once per category.
- No. 0095vs0
Google shipped the AI opt-out without the data to use it
Search Console's AI opt-out is rolling out now. The same console reports impressions and no clicks, so the trade-off it asks you to make cannot be measured.
- No. 00841%vs66%
The zero-click rate is 46.96%. The average is the least useful part.
iPullRank measured 13.1 billion search events. Zero-click runs from 41% in Japan to 66% on US mobile, so a single blended benchmark tells you very little.
July 2026
7 entries
- No. 0071xto8.4x
Google is now AI Mode's #2 cited domain. Read the footnote.
Profound reports google.com's AI Mode citation share rose 8.4x in ten weeks. The measurement is domain-level, which changes what the number means for you.
- No. 00672%vs42%
The freshness illusion: why AI cites edited pages, not new ones
Seer Interactive dated 7,683 AI-cited pages: 72% look fresh by update date, but only 42% were published within the past year. What that gap actually means.
- No. 0057.3%to1.6%
The position-1 CTR collapse: from 7.3% to 1.6% in two years
Ahrefs 300K-keyword data: position-1 CTR on AI Overview keywords fell from 7.3% to 1.6% between Dec 2023 and Dec 2025. The zero-click economics behind the drop.
- No. 0041 / 94,614
llms.txt does not work: 1 cited URL in 94,614
One cited URL in 94,614 came from an llms.txt page. Why adoption never became usage, what Google says on the record, and what moves AI citations instead of it.
- No. 00361.7%
Ghost citations: 61.7% of AI citations rank outside the organic top 100
61.7% of AI citations point to URLs outside the organic top 100 (Profound, 340M prompts). What ghost citations are, why they happen, what publishers should do.
- No. 00276%to38%
AI search visibility statistics 2026: every verified number, sourced
Every verified AI search visibility statistic our desk holds in July 2026 — citation behavior, traffic impact, platform mechanics — each with a primary source.
- No. 00115.9%vs1.76%
AI referral traffic is small, and converts at 9x the organic rate
ChatGPT referrals convert at 15.9% versus 1.76% for organic search (Orbit Media). Why AI traffic is small but valuable, and why analytics miss most of it.
By topic
14 topics
AI crawlers 3
AI Mode 3
AI Overviews 6
- No. 028One test says 93 of 100 brands. The study citing it says 63 of 100.
- No. 025Advertising up 2%. Then down 1%. The AI Overviews sentence survived.
- No. 020Google showed AI Overviews on 39.1% of election queries and 65.3% of others
- No. 012AI Overviews out-trust TikTok. The headline number isn't in the report.
- No. 011A publisher put AI Overviews in an SEC filing. Revenue fell 1%.
- No. 009Google shipped the AI opt-out without the data to use it
Answer engines 4
- No. 027Three click-through ranges in one filing. The widest ran in neither story.
- No. 024One tracker says 100%. The other says 86%. Same feature, same August.
- No. 023Two experts, one 8.2 million conversation sample, and the numbers 59,545 and 51
- No. 022Two newspapers sued OpenAI and called it an answer engine
GEO 5
- No. 035Schema markup and AI answers: 0 lab pages, 1 Google slide, +7.5% and -5.3%
- No. 034What actually gets a page into an AI answer: eight tactics, ranked by evidence
- No. 018An SEC filing credits McKinsey for a 60% stat. The number is Bain's.
- No. 014Generative engine optimization is in 47 SEC filings. Read the risk factors.
- No. 010Cloudflare shipped an AI visibility score. It asks two models.