The Shift
Buyers no longer start with ten blue links.
They ask an engine, and the engine answers with a shortlist. Either a company is in that answer or a competitor is. The 14 figures below are why, and each one states its publisher and its date so it can be checked rather than taken on faith.
weekly ChatGPT users, up from 400 million one year earlier.
prompts sent to ChatGPT every day, amounting to 18 billion messages a week.
GenAI chatbots rank first in influencing B2B vendor shortlists, ahead of review sites and vendor websites.
AI-referred visitors convert 42 percent better than all other traffic. A year earlier they converted 38 percent worse.
The B2B buyer has moved
Vendor research had already shifted to AI-mediated discovery by the time this edition went out.
of B2B technology buyers use AI search in their initial vendor research, up from 17 percent in 2023.
of B2B buyers now use AI tools such as ChatGPT and Perplexity in their research process.
growth in LLM referral traffic to websites, year over year.
of Fortune 500 companies have ChatGPT in their workflows.
The consumer has moved
Retail behavior tracked the same direction as B2B research behavior.
ChatGPT's share as a product research tool — a fifteen-fold rise in two years.
year-over-year growth in AI traffic to US retail sites in the first quarter of 2026, after a 693 percent holiday surge.
in online Black Friday sales influenced by AI in a single day.
of consumers plan to use generative AI to shop in 2026, and 85 percent of those who have say it improved the experience.
The gap most companies have not seen yet
The first statement of the finding this brief has returned to in every edition since.
the collapse in overlap between top-ten Google rankings and AI answer citations, in under a year.
How this can be misread: Corrected in the August 2026 edition. A wider read of the same period puts the range at 17 to 54 percent, and the finding is now sourced to three bodies rather than one.
of Fortune 500 companies currently track their AI search performance at all.
Every source, and how independent it is.
Research in this category is published largely by companies selling into it. That does not make it wrong, and on several questions it is the only data that exists — but a reader deserves to know which findings come from a disinterested party and which come from a firm with a product to sell. Each figure above carries its tier. Here is what the three tiers mean.
Independent research
2 sourcesSurvey organizations, newsrooms, infrastructure operators and academic bodies with no product to sell in this category.
PYMNTS Intelligence · Reuters
Platform disclosure
4 sourcesFigures published by the companies operating the engines or measuring the traffic. Authoritative on their own systems, and self-interested about the size of them.
Adobe · Adobe Digital Insights · Capital One Shopping and Adobe · OpenAI
Vendor research
6 sourcesStudies published by firms that sell software or services in the search and answer-optimization market. Frequently the only data that exists on a question, and worth reading with the seller's interest in view.
AirOps · Averi · G2 Buyer Behavior Report · Katalysts · Mersel AI · Search Engine Land
Figures as reported by each source at publication, refreshed quarterly by AIGNCI.
This is an archived edition, preserved as published. Figures have not been updated since its publication date, and where a later edition corrected one, the correction is noted on the figure itself. Read the current edition.
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