44 AI Marketing Statistics for 2025

AI is changing how we make content and how brands show up in search results. To keep up and make smart choices, we need to understand the latest data. These AI marketing statistics come from multiple studies we’ve done to help marketers and SEO teams know what’s happening and what they can do. We’ve done many data studies to help marketers and SEO teams know what’s happening and what they can do. If you want to get updates when we share new studies, you can sign up for our newsletter. But for now, here are the latest stats about how AI is changing marketing.

AI Overviews and What They Mean

AI Overviews are changing how people search, how websites get traffic, and how brands are seen on Google.

• AI Overviews now reach 1.5 billion users each month. (Google)
• Since the March Core Update, AI Overviews have grown by 116%. (Ahrefs)
• On desktop, AI Overviews show up for 9.46% of all keywords. In the U.S., it’s 16%. (Ahrefs)
• In total, AI Overviews appear for 12.8% or more of all Google searches. (Ahrefs)
• They show up more often for informational and long search queries with high volume. (Ahrefs)
• They appear less often for brand names, local searches, or short queries. (Ahrefs)
• Most of the time, AI Overviews appear on searches that don’t make money. (Ahrefs)
• AI Overviews cause a 34.5% drop in clicks to other sites. (Ahrefs)
• 43% of AI Overviews link back to other Google services. (SERanking)

How People Search Using AI Overviews

AI Overviews are changing how people search and what they click on.

• 7 out of 10 users don’t read past the first part of an AI Overview. (Growth Memo)
• Younger users on mobile like AI answers and trust what others say online. Older users still prefer trusted websites and the usual search links. (Growth Memo)
• Posts on Reddit, YouTube, and forums get about one-third of the traffic left by AI Overviews. (Growth Memo)
• 90% of buyers visit the websites shown in AI Overviews. (TrustRadius)
• On average, ChatGPT users click 1.4 links each time they visit. Google users click only 0.6 times per visit. (Momentic Marketing)

Referral Traffic from AI

AI doesn’t send a lot of traffic right now, but it’s starting to affect how users find brands and explore content.

• AI brings only 0.1% of all referral traffic. (Ahrefs)
• Google sends 345 times more traffic than the top three AIs combined. (Ahrefs)
• AIs send about the same amount of traffic as Reddit. (Ahrefs)
• Perplexity now sends more traffic than Gemini. (Ahrefs)
• In the U.S., AI sends more traffic to business websites than in the UK or India. (Ahrefs)
• Smaller websites (under 10K visits) get 0.3% of traffic from AI tools, while large sites (over 1 million visits) get just 0.1%. (Ahrefs)
• Pages like product lists, helpful guides, and “best-of” articles get the most AI traffic. (Ahrefs)

Brand Visibility in AI

How often our brand is mentioned on the web matters more than ads or backlinks when it comes to being seen in AI tools.

• The top 50 websites get 28.90% of all mentions. (Ahrefs)
• Only 14% of the top 50 sources were shared across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI. (Ahrefs)
• Web mentions have the strongest link to visibility in AI Overviews. (Ahrefs)
• Mentions matter more than backlinks when it comes to AI visibility. (Ahrefs)
• The top 3 things that help brands show up in AI: web mentions, branded anchor texts, and branded search volume. (Ahrefs)
• Paid ads and branded ad spending have only a small effect on how often brands are shown in AI. (Ahrefs)
• Brands with the most mentions appear up to 10 times more often in AI Overviews than brands in the next level down. (Ahrefs)
• 26% of all brands don’t appear in any AI Overviews at all. (Ahrefs)
• If our site ranks first in normal Google search, we still have only a 25% chance to be shown in AI Overviews. (ZipTie)

AI Use in Content Marketing

Marketers are using AI a lot for almost every part of content creation.

• 74.2% of new web pages have some AI-written content. (Ahrefs)
• 87% of marketers now use AI to help make content. (Ahrefs)
• With AI, companies publish 42% more content each month. Those using AI publish 17 articles a month, while others publish only 12. (Ahrefs)
• ChatGPT is the most used AI tool for content (44%), followed by Gemini (15%) and Claude (10%). In total, 94 AI tools were mentioned. (Ahrefs)
• 97% of companies still edit AI content. Only 4% post AI content without changes. 80% always check the content manually for mistakes. (Ahrefs)
• Blog posts are the most common use of AI (87%). Other popular tasks include idea generation (76%), making outlines (73%), and updating old content (67%). (Ahrefs)

Platform Differences and AI Assistant Preferences

Different AI tools prefer different content sources.

• Wikipedia is the top source for all three AI tools. ChatGPT uses it most (16.3%), then Perplexity (12.5%), then AI Overviews (8.4%). (Ahrefs)
• YouTube is used a lot in Perplexity (16.1%) and AI Overviews (9.5%), but not as much in ChatGPT. (Ahrefs)
• Reddit and Quora appear only in AI Overviews (7.4% & 3.6%). They don’t show up in the top 10 for ChatGPT or Perplexity. Google seems to prefer content made by users. (Ahrefs)
• News sites like Reuters, Apple News (AP), and AS.com show up more in ChatGPT (4–2.6%) but are less used in other tools. ChatGPT prefers news sources. (Ahrefs)
• Health sites like Mayo Clinic and Cleveland Clinic are listed in AI Overviews but not in the top 10 for ChatGPT or Perplexity. Perplexity prefers niche health sites like tuasaude and alodokter. (Ahrefs)

AI Bot Behavior

The number of AI bots is growing fast, but many websites are starting to block them.

• The number of AI bots has doubled since August 2023. There are now 21 major AI bots active online. (Ahrefs)
• GPTBot (OpenAI) is the most blocked AI bot. 5.89% of websites block it. (Ahrefs)
• ClaudeBot (Anthropic) had the biggest rise in block rates — 32.67% more sites block it compared to last year. (Ahrefs)