In this article, we have compiled key findings and insights on how the AI search user experience is changing right now, which sources are most frequently cited in AI search results, and which AI search trends are worth paying attention to.
1,090
respondents surveyed
78.0%
use AI search multiple times per week
58.7%
reduced or replaced traditional search
27.5%
never open source links after AI answer
AI Search Stats Key Takeaways
- 71.2% of AI search answers include at least one citation.
- An average answer includes 3.7 citations, while about 29% of answers include none.
- The top 10 domains account for 15.9% of all citations.
- 64.3% of all cited domains appear only once, showing a strong long-tail effect.
- Wikipedia, YouTube, and Reddit are the three most cited domains in AI search results.
- In our survey of 1,090 U.S. users, 78% use AI search multiple times per week, and 58.7% say it has reduced or replaced traditional search.
Survey: Daily Interaction with AI Search
To understand how real users interact with AI search on a daily basis, we surveyed 1,090 respondents across the United States in February 2026. The survey covered usage frequency, preferred tasks, motivations for choosing AI search over traditional search, post-answer behavior, and the overall impact on traditional search habits.
How Often Do People Use AI Search?
More than half of respondents (54.1%) use AI search every single day, and another 23.9% use it a few times a week. Combined, 78% of surveyed users interact with AI search tools multiple times per week, making it a daily habit rather than an occasional experiment.
Source: Searcherries
What Tasks Drive People to AI Search?
Quick fact-checking is the most popular use case (67.0% of respondents), followed by deep research and topic synthesis (52.3%). Comparing options and getting recommendations are each chosen by about a third of users. Writing and drafting tasks (33.9%) are just as common as product recommendations, suggesting AI search is becoming a productivity tool, not just an information tool.
Source: Searcherries
Why Do People Choose AI Search Over Traditional Search?
The number-one reason is speed: 68.8% of respondents say AI search is simply faster at delivering a direct answer. The second most cited motivation is the desire for personalized advice (40.4%), followed by not wanting to sift through multiple websites (31.2%). Nearly a quarter (23.9%) value the ability to ask follow-up questions in a conversational flow.
Source: Searcherries
What Do Users Do After Getting an AI Answer?
The largest group (34.9%) opens one or two links to verify or learn more, a sign of cautious trust. However, 27.5% find the AI answer sufficient and never click through to sources. Another 17.4% cross-check using traditional search, while 10.1% continue the conversation with follow-up questions.
Source: Searcherries
How Has AI Search Changed Traditional Search Habits?
For 35.8% of respondents, AI search has completely replaced traditional search in most cases. Another 22.9% report a significant reduction in their use of traditional search engines. Combined, nearly 6 out of 10 users (58.7%) have substantially shifted away from traditional search.
Source: Searcherries
Research: Source Citations in AI Search Results
Citations in AI search answers help people trust the result and understand where the information comes from. To spot patterns at scale, we analyzed a dataset with 24,069 real multi-turn search sessions across 13 AI search models from OpenAI, Google, and Perplexity. The dataset covers 72 languages and contains over 171,000 individual source citations.
71.2%
of answers contain at least one citation
55,838
unique domains cited
72
languages in queries
3.7
avg citations per answer
How Many Sources Do AI Search Engines Cite?
The average AI search answer in our dataset contains 3.7 citations. The median answer cites 3 sources, but the distribution is skewed: 28.8% of answers cite zero sources, while a small number of detailed answers cite 20 or more.
Source: Searcherries
Most Cited Domains in AI Search
Wikipedia is the single most cited domain with 8,210 citations (4.8% of all citations), followed by YouTube and Reddit. News publishers, developer platforms, academic repositories, and professional networks also appear in the top 10.
Source: Searcherries
The Long Tail: Can Smaller Websites Appear in AI Search?
Despite the dominance of YouTube and Wikipedia at the top, AI search citations are remarkably spread out. The cumulative-share curve shows how slowly citations concentrate by domain rank. Meanwhile, 35,939 domains (64% of all) were cited exactly once.
15.9%
Top 10 domains
+9.8%
Domains 11-100
64.3%
Cited once
74.3%
All other domains
Source: Searcherries
Source Category Breakdown
We classified every cited domain into one of eight categories. The vast majority of citations (80.3%) go to websites outside the traditional authoritative categories. Video platforms account for 4.5%, encyclopedias for 4.2%, and user-generated content platforms for 3.2%.
Source: Searcherries
Social and UGC Platforms in AI Search Results
Social and user-generated content platforms together account for 8.3% of all AI search citations (14,239 citations). YouTube alone makes up more than half of that figure. Reddit is cited more often than any traditional news outlet.
Source: Searcherries
Commercial vs. Non-profit Domains
Breaking down citations by top-level domain type, 58.6% come from commercial domains (.com, .io, .ai), while non-profit domains (.org, .edu, .gov) make up 14.8%. Country-code TLDs represent 19.3% of all citations.
Source: Searcherries
Citation Count Varies by Language
Not all languages receive the same number of source citations. Indonesian queries get the most citations on average (4.33 per answer), while Korean queries get the fewest (3.20). English sits in the middle at 3.94.
Source: Searcherries
What Do People Ask AI Search Engines?
The most common query type is Factual Lookup (19.3% of all queries), followed by Information Synthesis (18.6%). Recommendation queries generate the most citations on average (4.71), while Text Processing queries generate the fewest (1.87).
Source: Searcherries
Earlier Citations Tend to Be More Authoritative
The first source cited in an AI search answer is more likely to come from a high-trust domain (news, encyclopedia, academic, government). 15.1% of first citations are high-trust, compared to just 7.8% by position 10.
Citation position in the AI answer: #1 is the first cited source, #2 is the second, and so on.
Source: Searcherries
How AI Search Answers Are Formatted
AI search answers make heavy use of rich formatting. 69.7% of answers use bold text, 60.4% contain bullet lists, and roughly a third use headers or numbered lists. Tables appear in 9.5% of answers, while code blocks show up in 5.9%.
Source: Searcherries
Most Cited Domains in AI Search
| Rank | Domain | Category | Citations | Share |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | wikipedia.org | Encyclopedia | 8,210 | 4.8% |
| 2 | youtube.com | Video | 7,370 | 4.3% |
| 3 | reddit.com | UGC | 4,318 | 2.5% |
| 4 | reuters.com | News | 1,494 | 0.9% |
| 5 | github.com | Code | 1,491 | 0.9% |
| 6 | google.com | Search | 1,029 | 0.6% |
| 7 | pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov | Academic | 961 | 0.6% |
| 8 | arxiv.org | Academic | 905 | 0.5% |
| 9 | apnews.com | News | 903 | 0.5% |
| 10 | linkedin.com | Professional | 504 | 0.3% |
What Do People Ask AI Search Engines?
| Query Type | Share of Queries | Avg Citations |
|---|---|---|
| Factual Lookup | 19.3% | 3.40 |
| Info Synthesis | 18.6% | 4.64 |
| Analysis | 10.9% | 4.11 |
| Recommendation | 10.8% | 4.71 |
| Explanation | 10.4% | 4.11 |
| Creative Generation | 9.5% | 2.28 |
| Guidance | 9.1% | 3.68 |
| Other | 8.2% | 2.57 |
| Text Processing | 3.1% | 1.87 |
Source Diversity per Answer
Among answers that cite at least one source, the average number of unique domains per answer is 4.5. The same website is rarely cited more than once within a single response.
Query and Answer Length
The median query length is just 71 characters, most people keep their AI search prompts short. Answers average 2,309 characters, roughly 350 to 400 words. There is a moderate positive correlation between answer length and the number of citations (r = 0.34): longer answers tend to cite more sources.
Trends: What is Changing in AI Search
- Gartner predicts traditional search engine volume will drop by 25% by 2026 as users shift to AI chatbots.
- AI Overviews are already available in 200+ countries and territories and in 40+ languages.
- About 50% of Google searches already include AI-generated summaries, a figure expected to rise to 75%+ by 2028.
- 69% of users do not click through to news sites when searching for news on Google. Before the launch of AI Overviews, the zero-click rate for these queries was 56%.
- 36% of surveyed users discovered a new product or brand through ChatGPT.
- 77% of users in the U.S. use ChatGPT as a search engine.
- Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results.
References
- LMArena / Hugging Face. lmarena-ai/search-arena-24k.
- Mihran Miroyan, Tsung-Han Wu, Logan Kenneth King, Tianle Li, Anastasios N. Angelopoulos, Wei-Lin Chiang, Narges Norouzi, Joseph E. Gonzalez. Search Arena: Analyzing Search-Augmented LLMs.
- Mihran Miroyan, Tsung-Han Wu, Logan Kenneth King, Tianle Li, Anastasios N. Angelopoulos, Wei-Lin Chiang, Narges Norouzi, Joseph E. Gonzalez. Introducing the Search Arena: Evaluating Search-Enabled AI.
- Gartner Predicts Search Engine Volume Will Drop 25% by 2026, Due to AI Chatbots and Other Virtual Agents.
- Google. AI Overviews are now available in over 200 countries and territories, and more than 40 languages.
- McKinsey. New front door to the internet: Winning in the age of AI search.
- Similarweb. Report: The Impact of Generative AI on Publishers.
- Adobe Express. How ChatGPT is changing the way we search.
- Pew Research Center. Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results.