Research · Reports

GEO in 2026: what the latest industry reports say

Twelve public reports from analysts, data providers and Korean survey houses, published between December 2025 and September 2026, read side by side. The picture is consistent: fewer clicks from search, more and better-qualified visitors from AI, and a measurement problem the industry has not solved.

By Taegyu Kim12 Oct, 202611 min read

68% of Google searches now end without a click

A year ago, most GEO advice rested on anecdotes and one Princeton paper. In 2026 the evidence base looks different. Clickstream panels, web analytics covering a trillion retail visits, analyst surveys and a national statistics office have all published on how AI changes search behaviour. This digest collects the figures that are attributable to a named report and a date, and reads them together.

Key takeaways

68% of Google searches ended without a click in 2026, up from about 45% a decade earlier (Similarweb and SparkToro, June 2026). Where an AI Overview appears, the top result's click-through rate is 58% lower (Ahrefs, February 2026).
AI platforms sent an average of 770.7 million referral visits a month worldwide, up 117.4% year on year (Similarweb, September 2026); ChatGPT accounted for 95.1% of AI referrals in August 2026 (BrightEdge, September 2026).
Consumers use AI to research and narrow choices, not to buy: only 11% of U.S. consumers would let AI make a purchase decision (Gartner, May 2026), while 63% of European AI shoppers use it to compare brands and prices (McKinsey, March 2026).
In Korea, generative AI experience reached 44.5% of the population (MSIT, March 2026) and 58.1% of search users had used ChatGPT in the past three months (Opensurvey, July 2026), while Naver's search share climbed to 81.34% after its AI Briefing and AI Tab launches (Internet Trend, May 2026).

How we read the reports

We included reports that are public, name their data source and give a publication date. Vendor datasets are included where the vendor discloses the panel or the measurement (Similarweb's clickstream panel, Adobe Analytics' trillion retail visits, Semrush's 200-million-user panel), and we note where a figure comes from a press release without a methodology. Measurement windows differ between reports, so we do not average across them; each number below carries its own publisher and date.

12Reports and surveys, Dec 2025 to Sep 2026

5Korean sources: MSIT, Opensurvey, Internet Trend, KPF, Naver

0Figures without a named publisher and date

Clicks from search keep thinning, but unevenly

The clearest single number of the year comes from the Similarweb clickstream panel used for Rand Fishkin's SparkToro study: 68.01% of Google searches in 2026 ended without a click to any website, against roughly 45% on the Jumpshot panel in 2016 (Similarweb, "Zero-Click Marketing", June 2026). Pew Research Center's browsing-data study, published in July 2025 and released as a peer-reviewed paper in August 2026, puts the mechanism in view: when a Google results page carried an AI summary, users clicked a traditional result in 8% of visits versus 15% without one, clicked a link inside the summary in only 1% of visits, and ended their browsing session in 26% of visits versus 16% (Pew Research Center, July 2025; Chapekis, Lieb, Shah and Smith, arXiv, August 2026).

Ahrefs measured the effect at the page level. Comparing 150,000 keywords with an AI Overview against 150,000 informational keywords without one, using Google Search Console desktop data for December 2023 and December 2025, it found the presence of an AI Overview correlated with a 58% lower click-through rate for the top-ranking page, up from 34.5% in its April 2025 study (Ahrefs, February 2026).

Estimated CTR impact of an AI Overview, by organic position

Change in desktop click-through rate for pages ranking at each position, Dec 2023 vs Dec 2025

Position 1-58.0%
Position 2-50.8%
Position 3-46.4%
Position 5-32.6%
Position 10-19.4%

Source: Ahrefs, "AI Overviews Reduce Clicks by 58%", February 2026. 300,000 keywords, Google Search Console desktop data.

The aggregate picture is softer than the per-query one. Graphite's analysis of more than 42,000 U.S. sites with over 100,000 monthly visits found organic traffic from Google down only 2.5% year on year, with visits to Google itself up 1.4% comparing Q4 2025 with Q4 2024 (Graphite, "Debunking the Myth That Search Is Dying", January 2026). The two findings are compatible: AI Overviews appear on a minority of queries, concentrated in informational searches, and that is where clicks fall hardest. Google's own AI Mode shows what a fully answer-first interface does to referrals: Similarweb measured a referral rate of 1.6% to 2.5% of queries for AI Mode against 17% to 19% for traditional Google results, while AI Mode itself handled only 0.34% of Google searches between January and April 2026 (Similarweb, June 2026).

AI referrals: fast growth from a small base

Every traffic provider reports the same shape. Similarweb's 2026 Generative AI Landscape counted an average of 770.7 million referral visits a month from ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Grok and DeepSeek worldwide between June 2025 and May 2026, up 117.4% year on year, with marketplaces (46.8 million a month, up 237.3%), news and travel (44.5 million each) receiving the most (Similarweb, September 2026). Semrush's 17-month clickstream study found ChatGPT's outbound referrals grew 206% between January 2025 and January 2026, while the number of distinct domains receiving a referral peaked near 260,000 in October 2025 and fell back to about 170,000 by February 2026 (Semrush, April 2026).

Year-on-year growth in AI referral visits, by industry

Worldwide, desktop and mobile web, June 2025 to May 2026 vs the prior twelve months

+312.5%Beauty

+278.2%Fashion

+237.3%Marketplaces

+236.5%Finance

+215.4%Electronics

+115.6%News

+115.6%Travel

Source: Similarweb, "AI Referral Traffic by Industry", September 2026. Referral visits only; visits without referrer data are counted as direct, so the figures are a floor.

Concentration is the second theme. BrightEdge reported that ChatGPT's referral traffic rose 101% between January and August 2026 and that its share of all AI referrals reached a 2026 high of 95.1% in August, with Gemini at 2.4%, Perplexity at 1.1% and Claude at 0.8%; over the same stretch Gemini grew 1% while Claude fell 15% and Perplexity 17% (BrightEdge, September 2026). The release does not disclose its sample, so treat the shares as a view of BrightEdge's customer base rather than of the web.

The third theme is the gap between use and referrals. Similarweb's 2026 AI Brand Visibility Index shows monthly visits to AI platforms climbing toward 1.5 billion while referrals from those platforms stayed flat between 240 and 280 million from mid-2025 through January 2026 (Similarweb, June 2026). Bain puts the proportion in business terms: for some retailers AI already accounts for up to a quarter of referral traffic, yet less than 1% of total traffic (Bain, "Agentic AI in Retail", May 2026).

Consumers research with AI, but do not delegate

Analyst surveys published this year agree on the role AI plays in a purchase. Gartner's January 2026 release found only about one-third of U.S. consumers consider GenAI chatbots as effective as search engines for learning new information, though 51% said GenAI had changed their research habits (365 U.S. consumers, July to August 2025). Its May 2026 survey of 322 U.S. consumers found willingness to let AI make a purchase decision topped out at 11% even in low-stakes categories, while 31% would let AI narrow choices for household supplies and 28% for personal electronics; in a separate survey of 846 consumers, 54% of AI shoppers said they had to double-check all information GenAI provided (Gartner, May 2026).

Finding	Figure	Source and date
U.S. consumers who would let AI make a purchase decision	11%	Gartner, May 2026 (n = 322, Jan 2026)
European consumers who use AI for purchase decisions	38%	McKinsey, "Europe's agentic commerce moment", March 2026
European AI shoppers who use it to compare brands, prices and reviews	63%	McKinsey, March 2026
U.S. consumers who use generative AI for product comparison	About 30%	Bain Consumer Lab survey, May 2026
U.S. consumers who have used AI for online shopping	39%	Adobe survey of 5,000+ respondents, April 2026
Shoppers using AI who also use a search engine	89%	Similarweb, State of Ecommerce 2026, September 2026
B2B buyers who use AI in the buying process	94% (89% a year earlier)	Forrester Buyers' Journey Survey, January 2026

McKinsey's European survey adds the use cases: among consumers who shop with AI, 63% compare brands, models, prices and reviews, 55% use it to learn about a category and 46% for inspiration and discovery (McKinsey, March 2026). Similarweb's State of Ecommerce 2026 report found that in some cases an AI recommendation gives the recommended brand a two-to-one advantage over competitors, and that 89% of shoppers who use AI also use search: "Consumers are not switching tools, they are stacking them," in the words of lead author Daniel Reid (Similarweb, September 2026). Forrester's picture of B2B buying is the most advanced: 94% of business buyers used AI in their process, twice as many named generative AI or conversational search as their most meaningful information source as any other source, and 61% used a private AI tool supplied by their employer (Forrester, January 2026).

What the academic reviews add

Two peer-reviewed contributions tempered the vendor numbers this year. A critical survey of 45 GEO studies published between November 2023 and July 2026 concluded that the gains in the foundational GEO paper hold only when a source is already inside a fixed context window, that commercial audits show low source overlap and substantial run-to-run variability, and that "no reviewed technique shows a stable, longitudinal, cross-platform causal effect on organic discoverability or downstream behavior" (Martinez, arXiv, July 2026). Topical relevance and position within the retrieved context were the most reproducible levers.

Measurement should vary the run, the paraphrase, the date and the engine. A single prompt on a single day is an anecdote, not a visibility score.

The practical lesson is about measurement rather than tactics: visibility in AI answers has to be sampled repeatedly across prompts, days and engines before a change can be called a result. The Pew study's path from a short read in July 2025 to a reviewed paper in August 2026 is the other half of the lesson: the click gap it measured survived scrutiny.

Korea: adoption jumps, Naver holds the search box

Korea's official statistics caught up with the trend this year. The Ministry of Science and ICT's 2025 Internet Usage Survey, covering 22,671 households and 50,750 people aged three and over, found 44.5% of the population had used a generative AI service, up 11.2 percentage points from 33.3%; ChatGPT was used by 41.8%, Gemini by 9.8%, Copilot by 2.2% and CLOVA X by 2.0%, and 7.9% paid for a subscription (MSIT, March 2026). Among office workers the experience rate was 71.9%.

44.5%Koreans who have used generative AI, +11.2 pp (MSIT, Mar 2026)

58.1%Search users who used ChatGPT in the past 3 months (Opensurvey, Jul 2026)

81.34%Naver share of Korean search, 24 May 2026 (Internet Trend via Newsway)

Opensurvey's AI Search Trend Report for the second half of 2026, a survey of 1,000 search users, shows how fast the platform mix moves: 58.1% had used ChatGPT and 52.2% Gemini in the past three months, with Gemini up 23.3 percentage points in six months and ahead of ChatGPT on satisfaction (77.3% versus 70.6%). Generative AI was the first screen for 36.5% of work and study searches and 27.2% of knowledge searches, while Naver remained the first screen for 67.1% of daily-life searches and 60.5% of news searches (Opensurvey, July 2026). Its February 2026 edition had already recorded ChatGPT at 54.5% and Naver's overall usage at 81.6% (Opensurvey, February 2026).

Naver's answer to AI search is working on the share metric. Web analytics firm Internet Trend measured Naver's share of Korean search at 64.39% between 1 January and 7 March 2026, an eight-year high roughly one year after AI Briefing launched (News1 and kt nasmedia, March to April 2026), and at 81.34% on 24 May 2026 against 59.26% a year earlier, after the April beta of AI Tab, with Google falling to 14.87% (Newsway, May 2026). Naver reported that AI Briefing reached its end-2025 target of 20% of integrated search queries early and plans to roughly double coverage to about 40%; long-form queries grew more than 2.5 times and clicks on follow-up questions more than ten times over the year (Naver via kt nasmedia and Newsway, 2026). On the news side, the Reuters Institute's Digital News Report 2026, analysed by the Korea Press Foundation, found 14% of Koreans used an AI chatbot for news, double the previous year and the highest rate surveyed alongside Turkey, against a global average of 10% (Reuters Institute and KPF, June 2026).

What this means for Korean brands

Analyze before you write. The reports describe a market where the answer, not the link, is the unit of competition, and where visibility varies from run to run. Start by measuring how often AI engines name your brand for the questions your customers actually ask, across engines and over repeated runs, and compare against competitors. That is the job of GEO Insight and Prompt Demand.
Create for two readers. Korean search is now split: Naver AI Briefing for daily-life and news intent, ChatGPT and Gemini for knowledge and work. Content has to be readable by both the Naver crawler and the AI retrievers, and distributed to the sources those engines cite. Content Agent and Channel Agent exist for that step.
Measure beyond the referrer. With referrals flat while AI usage doubles, AI referral sessions alone understate the effect. Track branded search and direct visits alongside AI referrals, and track conversion per source rather than volume. Analytics closes that loop.

Sources

Taegyu Kimflowgen

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