AI Overviews Now Appear in 43% of US Searches

Google's AI-generated summaries now appear in 43% of US searches, up from 15% a year earlier, according to Similarweb's 2026 Generative AI Landscape report. Just as important, the same data shows ChatGPT increasingly cites deep, specific pages rather than homepages, while the traffic it sends often lands somewhere else entirely. That gap between what gets cited and what gets clicked is now the central problem in AI search visibility.

What changed?

Similarweb tracked how often Google's AI summaries appear in US search results and how AI platforms cite and link to external sites. Google's AI-generated summaries appeared in 43% of US searches measured, up from 15% a year earlier, according to the market intelligence firm's report. That's a near-tripling in twelve months, and it confirms AI summaries have moved from a novelty feature to the default search experience for a huge share of queries.

The report also measured how often ChatGPT responses include web citations at all. Similarweb found that the share of ChatGPT responses containing web citations increased more than fivefold over the past year, rising from about 1.3% in June 2025 to 6.8% in May 2026, based on US desktop activity, according to the same analysis. That's still a small minority of responses, but the direction of travel is clear: ChatGPT is citing sources far more often than it was a year ago.

Citation frequency isn't uniform across topics. Higher rates showed up in travel, retail and sports responses, where information such as prices, availability, comparisons and results can change frequently. If your business sits in one of those categories, the odds of being cited are meaningfully higher than average.

Perhaps the most useful finding for marketers concerns what happens after a citation, not just whether one occurs. About 65% of URLs cited by ChatGPT were located two or three folders below the main domain, including articles, product pages and other detailed content, with folder-depth two alone accounting for 41.7% of cited URLs, per Similarweb's data. In other words, ChatGPT is doing its homework on deep content, not just skimming homepages.

But the page that gets cited and the page a user actually visits are often different. By comparison, 58.8% of AI referral traffic landed on homepages. Similarweb's own read on this is that the content used to support an AI answer and the page visited after a click often serve different functions, with detailed pages supplying information for a response while displayed links direct users to a company or publisher's main website.

There's also a clear before-and-after moment tied to a specific ChatGPT product change. ChatGPT's May 7 search update gave brand links greater prominence within generated responses. The effect was immediate and large: Similarweb recorded a 157.7% week-over-week increase in referral traffic following the update, while homepage referrals increased 354.7%, as reported. Similarweb was careful to note the limits of that finding, however, since the increases were observed after the interface change but a direct causal link was not established.

None of this happens in isolation from user behaviour on rival platforms. Similarweb also found that most ChatGPT users continued to use Google, with audience overlap among ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude indicating that people were using several search and AI services rather than moving exclusively to one platform. AI search isn't replacing Google search for most people, it's sitting alongside it.

Why does this matter for your business?

If AI Overviews now touch 43% of US searches, most brands are already being represented, correctly or not, in an AI-generated summary before a user ever sees a traditional results page. That's not a future risk. It's the current baseline for a huge share of commercial queries.

The homepage-versus-deep-page split matters because it changes what "optimisation" actually means. It's not enough to have a strong homepage and hope AI tools find their way to your best content. Nearly two-thirds of cited URLs sit two or three folders deep, with folder-depth two alone making up more than 40% of citations, so your product pages, comparison pages and detailed articles need to stand on their own as citable, extractable sources of fact.

At the same time, don't assume a citation automatically produces a homepage visit, or vice versa. The data shows these are two separate jobs: earning the citation on a deep page, and making sure the resulting click, wherever it lands, gives the visitor what they came for. A homepage that can't quickly orient a visitor arriving from an AI answer is wasting the traffic the citation earned.

The sector variation in citation rates is a signal too. If you're in travel, retail or sports, where prices, availability and results change constantly, ChatGPT is more likely to reach for a live source rather than rely on stale training data. That's an opportunity: keep pricing, stock and results pages current, structured and easy to parse, because AI platforms appear to reward exactly that kind of freshness in these categories.

What should you do now?

Start by checking whether your deep content, not just your homepage, is structured to stand alone. A product page, pricing page or comparison page should contain clear, self-contained facts, such as dates, figures and specifications, without requiring a visitor to have read the homepage first.

Next, audit your homepage experience specifically for AI-referred visitors. If Similarweb's finding holds for your traffic too, well over half of your AI-driven visits could land there rather than on the page that actually answered the query. Make sure your homepage can quickly point a confused visitor to the right destination.

If you're in a frequently changing category such as travel, retail or e-commerce, prioritise keeping time-sensitive pages current. This data suggests these are exactly the pages AI platforms are more inclined to cite and refresh from.

Finally, track your own citation and referral patterns rather than relying on industry averages. Sited's free audit at sited.online can show you which of your pages are actually being picked up by AI platforms right now, so you're working from your own data rather than guessing.

Frequently asked questions

What is Similarweb's 2026 Generative AI Landscape report?

It's a market intelligence study tracking how often AI-generated summaries appear in Google search results and how AI platforms such as ChatGPT cite and link to external websites. It found Google's AI-generated summaries appeared in 43% of US searches, up from 15% a year earlier.

Does a citation from ChatGPT guarantee a website visit?

No. Citations cover responses displaying source references, rather than the proportion of user prompts that caused ChatGPT to search the web, and they don't confirm that a user opened the linked source. A citation shows a source was used to generate an answer, not that the reader clicked through.

Why do more AI referral visits land on homepages than on the cited page?

Similarweb suggests this reflects two different jobs the web is doing for AI systems: detailed pages supply information for a response, while displayed links direct users to a company or publisher's main website. The cited source and the destination link often aren't the same page.

Did ChatGPT's May 2026 update actually cause the referral traffic increase?

A large increase was recorded around that time, but Similarweb stopped short of confirming a direct cause. The May 7 search update gave brand links greater prominence within generated responses, and referral traffic rose 157.7% week-over-week following the update, with homepage referrals up 354.7%, though the firm did not establish that the update was solely responsible.

Should smaller brands worry about citation rates being so low?

Not necessarily. The share of ChatGPT responses containing web citations increased more than fivefold over the past year, from about 1.3% in June 2025 to 6.8% in May 2026, so the trend is upward even if the absolute numbers remain modest. Focus on being ready for citation when your category's query volume grows, rather than dismissing it because current rates look small.