Vendor reportHubSpot, 2026

49% of marketers agree that web traffic from search has dropped due to AI answers

Channel validation

49%

Share of marketers who say their search traffic has dropped because of AI-generated answers

Reader Note:: Self-reported. This is marketers agreeing that their search traffic fell and attributing the fall to AI answers - it is not a measurement, and the question does not separate AI answers from algorithm updates, seasonality or their own publishing slowdown. Fieldwork was September 2025, so by late 2026 this reading is more than a year old on a subject that moves in months.
Evidence:: Self-reported behaviour
Vendor interest:: Moderate — This comes from a company with a commercial interest in this market, so it is not a neutral source.
Sample:: HubSpot surveyed 1,505 marketers in September 2025 across North America, Europe, Asia and Australia, spanning seniority levels and industries; fieldwork run in collaboration with the research firm Datalily. The report does not disclose how the sample splits by region, industry or seniority, so every published figure is a single global average. It does report cuts by company size - small business, mid-market and enterprise.

Good for

A rough sense of size and direction, and deciding what to look at first.

Not for

Exact numbers, or saying that one thing caused another.
This comes from a company with a commercial interest in this market, so it is not a neutral source.
This is an aggregated or average number that covers very different cases. Real results in a particular segment may differ.
The source talks about this as cause and effect — that is its reading, not a finding.
The source says how much it looked at, but not how any of it was chosen.

4.4x

How much better an AI search visitor converts compared to an organic search visitor, on average

of Google searches that showed an AI summary ended with a click on a link inside that summary (US, March 2025)

20% of Gen Z and 17% of Millennials discover new brands through influencer endorsements, vs 12% of Gen X and 5% of Boomers

Share of each generation who discover new brands via influencer endorsements
Generation	Share who discover brands through influencers (%)
Gen Z	20%
Millennials	17%
Gen X	12%
Baby Boomers	5%

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Fixing your influencer marketing campaign: How to get into the top 10% of advertisers

11.4%

of shopper sessions in the US involved an AI tool as of June 2026, up 2.3 percentage points from a year earlier

is the short-term ROI index for influencer campaigns in the UK, right on the market average with 4.5% of short-term sales (excluding campaigns that produced no result)

21–26%

of consumers in the US, UK, and Germany report using AI tools to research products online, per Statista's 2026 Global Survey (Jul 2025–Jun 2026).

49% of marketers agree that web traffic from search has dropped due to AI answers

Good for

Not for

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