Vendor reportMcKinsey, 22 Jun 2026

Nearly half of consumers are already using AI-based search to guide their purchase decisions

Channel validation

~50%

of consumers already use AI-based search to guide their purchase decisions (Aug 2025)

Reader Note:: From the AI Discovery Survey rather than the marketer surveys the article also cites (footnote 1). Note that the same article later states that more than half of consumers already rely on AI to guide purchase decisions, citing a different McKinsey piece from October 2025 (footnote 8). The article gives two different figures for the same behaviour and does not reconcile them.
Evidence:: Self-reported behaviour
Vendor interest:: High — This comes from a company with a commercial interest in this market, so it is not a neutral source.
Sample:: Mixed source. The article combines several McKinsey surveys and case examples, including an AI Discovery Survey (August 2025, n=1,927), a McKinsey Global Survey on marketers (March 2026, n=521), and a McKinsey Global Survey on marketing executives (May 2026, n=26). Selection details are not disclosed in the article.

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.
The source says how much it looked at, but not how any of it was chosen.
The source never says how this number was measured.

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).

Nearly half of consumers are already using AI-based search to guide their purchase decisions

Good for

Not for

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