Similarweb's 2026 Generative AI Landscape report found that 461 million of ChatGPT's 494 million users also used Google between March and May 2026, a 95% overlap. The same research says generative-AI platforms averaged 9.5 billion monthly web visits from June 2025 through May 2026, showing rapid growth without evidence that users have broadly abandoned traditional search.
Similarweb's 2026 Generative AI Landscape report found that AI chat is growing alongside traditional search rather than replacing it. Search Engine Journal's review of the report says 461 million of ChatGPT's 494 million users also used Google between March and May 2026, equal to roughly 95% of the measured ChatGPT audience.
That overlap is a usage measure, not a claim that 95% of ChatGPT clicks went to Google or to a small group of sites. It shows that the same people used both services during the measurement window.
AI use is growing without a clean channel switch
Similarweb reports that generative-AI platforms averaged 9.5 billion monthly web visits between June 2025 and May 2026, up 70% year over year. Average monthly unique visitors rose 57% to 655 million. Traditional search still reached about 3.3 billion average monthly unique visitors, according to the report figures described by Search Engine Journal.
The combined picture is less dramatic than a replacement narrative. AI tools are becoming a routine discovery layer, but most measured ChatGPT users still kept Google in their browsing mix. For analytics teams, that means an AI-assisted journey may later appear as search or direct traffic rather than as an identifiable AI referral.
Citations and referral landings measure different behavior
Similarweb says the share of U.S. ChatGPT answers containing an external-source link rose to 6.8% in May 2026, from about 1.6% in June 2025. The increase is substantial, but links remained absent from most measured answers.
The report also highlights a mismatch between citation and click destinations. Similarweb's report page says 65% of cited URLs sat two or three folders deep, while 58.8% of AI referral traffic landed on homepages. A page can therefore supply evidence for an answer while the eventual visitor navigates to the brand's front door.
For practitioners, citation share and referral conversion should be tracked separately. Citation visibility indicates which content an AI system uses as evidence; landing-page and conversion data show what users do after they leave the assistant. Similarweb's panel estimates offer a useful market-level view, but teams should compare them with their own server logs, analytics definitions, and conversion paths before changing budgets.
Key Points #
- 1Similarweb tracked 461 million of ChatGPT's 494 million users also using Google between March and May 2026.
- 2Generative-AI platforms averaged 9.5 billion monthly web visits from June 2025 through May 2026, up 70% year over year.
- 3Only 6.8% of U.S. ChatGPT answers included an external-source link in May 2026, according to Similarweb.
- 4The report separates AI citation visibility from referral behavior because cited deep pages and clicked landing pages often differ.
Scoring Rationale #
The report provides current behavioral evidence about AI-search adoption, citation rates, and referral patterns that matters to analytics and discovery teams. It is an observational market study rather than a product launch or causal experiment, so its conclusions should be applied with panel and attribution limits in mind.
Sources #
Primary source and supporting public references used for this report.
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