Vendor reportSemrush, 21 Jul 2025

AI search visitors are projected to surpass traditional search visitors by 2028

Channel validation

Reader Note:: This projection depends on past growth and adoption rates.
Evidence:: Modelled / projected
Vendor interest:: High — This comes from a company with a commercial interest in this market, so it is not a neutral source.
Sample:: Based on over 500 high-value digital marketing and SEO-related topics and subtopics, translated into specific search terms and prompts, tested across Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity. Exact geographic scope and per-model query counts are not disclosed.

Good for

Planning with a rough expectation, and sanity-checking your own assumptions.

Not for

Reporting as what happened. This is what a model expects, not what anyone counted.
The source never says when this data was collected. It could be considerably older than the publication date suggests.
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.

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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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).

AI search visitors are projected to surpass traditional search visitors by 2028

Good for

Not for

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