70 SEO Statistics for 2026

ByShane Tran Updated on

For most websites, SEO is one of the best ways to get organic visitors. This is a current list of SEO stats that show what is actually working right now.

Featured SEO Statistics

  • 47% begin their search on Google, but 37% start with AI. (Eight Oh Two)
  • 75% of searchers never go past the first page of search results. (HubSpot)
  • 27% of marketers say that SEO is their top marketing channel for ROI. (HubSpot)
  • 88% of marketers are optimizing their content for AI Search like ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overview. (Salesforce)
  • 43.8% of traffic comes from Search, compared to 0.1% from LLMs. (Ahrefs)
  • AI Overviews reduce clicks by 58%. (Ahrefs)

Search Engine Statistics

  • Google has 89.82% of the global search engine market share. (Statcounter)
  • Google sees more than 5 trillion searches per year. (Google)
  • 15% of Google searches have never been searched before. (Google)
  • Google Index covers 100,000,000 gigabytes in size (Google)

Keyword Statistics

  • Keywords with 10-15 words get 1.76x more clicks than single-word terms. (Backlinko)
  • “YouTube” is the most searched term on Google (ExplodingTopics)
  • 94.74% of keywords get ten monthly searches or fewer. (Ahrefs)
  • 52.65% of all Google searches have informational intent. (SparkToro) 
  • Just 0.69% of all searches are transactional keywords. (SparkToro) 

Backlink Statistics

  • The #1 position on Google has an average of 3.8x more backlinks than the #2-#10 positions. (Backlinko)
  • 85.8% say digital PR is the most effective for building backlinks. (Buzzstream)
  • 95% of all pages have zero backlinks. (Backlinko)
  • 96% of websites in the top 10 on Google had more than 1,000 backlinks from unique domains. (SearchEngineLand)
  • 91.89% of respondents believe their competitors buy links. (Editorial Link)
  • 78.8% think that nofollow links impact rankings. (Editorial Link)
  • 73.2% say backlinks influence visibility in AI search results. (Editorial Link)

Technical SEO Statistics

  • 95.2% of sites have 3XX redirect issues. (Ahrefs)
  • 72.3% of sites have slow pages. (Ahrefs)
  • 33% of websites pass the Core Web Vitals threshold. (Ahrefs)
  • Generally, web pages load in 2.5 seconds on desktop and 8.6 seconds for mobile users. (Tooltester)
  • 88.5% of survey respondents said slow loading time is the top reason visitors leave a website. (Goodfirms)
  • 35.73% of websites have pages with a 4XX error. (SE Ranking)

Mobile SEO Statistics

  • It takes an average of 70.9% longer for webpages to load on mobile than on desktop. (Tooltester)
  • The average bounce rate for all websites is 56.8% for mobile, 50% for desktop, and 51.6% for tablet. (Tooltester)
  • Over 1.5 billion people use Google Lens monthly. (Google)
  • Mobile devices account for 70.5% of Google search traffic. (Semrush)
  • Google holds 94.46% of the global mobile search market. (Statcounter)
  • Google uses mobile-first indexing for 100% of new websites. (Google)
  • 5.78 billion people use a mobile phone today, which equates to 70.5% of the world’s total population. (Datareportal)

Local SEO Statistics

  • 49.2% of consumers used Google Maps to look up information about local businesses. (Soci)
  • 91% of consumers use reviews to evaluate local businesses. (Soci)
  • 94% of high-performing brands have a set local marketing strategy. (Brightlocal)
  • 68% will only use a business with four or more stars. (BrightLocal)
  • 65% say they’re more likely to choose a business that responds to reviews. (Soci)
  • 55% of all consumers say fake reviews are a growing concern. (Soci)
  • 40.2% of local business queries trigger Google’s AI Overviews. (Local Falcon)
  • Only 35% of SMBs have a Google Business Profile. (BrightLocal)
  • 1 in 5 consumers conduct local searches directly within maps. (BrightLocal)
  • 68% of consumers have used ChatGPT to research local products or services. (Yext)

Video SEO Statistics

  • Only 6% of YouTube videos that rank in the top three search positions have titles that exactly match the search keywords, while 75% have related keywords. (Adilo)
  • 83% of video results in search come from YouTube. (Perficient)
  • The average click-through rate (CTR) for a video result on Google is between 2.3% and 6.4%. (First Page Sage)
  • Videos under one minute see an average engagement rate of 50%, while those over 60 minutes have a 17% engagement rate. (Wistia)
  • The median length of YouTube videos in the top three positions is 536 seconds (8 – 9 minutes). (Adilo)
  • The median age of YouTube videos in the top three ranking positions is 29 months. (Adilo)

B2B SEO Statistics

  • 30% of B2B marketers say SEO is their most effective channel. (Surferseo)
  • Google holds 84.9% of the search engine market in B2B and is the main platform for buyers. (First Page Sage)
  • ChatGPT is the fastest-growing B2B search engine, holding a 3.2% market share with a 14% annual user growth rate. (First Page Sage)
  • In B2B industries, organic search generates 44.6% of all revenue. (BrightEdge)
  • In B2B SaaS, the average ROI from SEO is 702%, with a break-even time of just 7 months. (First Page Sage)
  • 45.7% of Google searches are branded. (Ahrefs)
  • 29% of B2B buyers start research with AI Search more often than Google. (G2)
  • 40% of B2B marketers say conversion is their biggest challenge in content marketing. (Content Marketing Institute)

AI SEO Statistics

  • Google AI Overviews reach 2 billion monthly users across more than 200 countries and 40 languages. (Google)
  • Over 91.3% of queries that trigger Google AI Overviews have an informational intent. (Semrush)
  • Wikipedia is the most cited domain in Google’s AI Mode, with over 1.1 million mentions (11.22% of all citations). (The Digital Bloom)
  • Reddit accounts for 21% of citations in Google AI Overviews and 46.5% of citations in Perplexity AI. (The Digital Bloom)
  • 50% of all links cited by ChatGPT point to business and service websites. (Semrush)
  • ChatGPT users click an average of 1.4 external links per visit, compared to just 0.6 links from Google users. (Momentic)
  • 80% of sources cited by AI search platforms do not appear in Google’s traditional search results, and only 12% match Google’s top results. (Ahrefs)
  • AI search platforms prefer to cite content that is 25.7% fresher than the content ranking on traditional SERPs. (Ahrefs)
  • 76.4% of ChatGPT’s most-cited pages were updated within the last 30 days. (Ahrefs)
  • The top 20 domains account for 66.18% of all citations in Google AI Overviews, with the top 5 capturing 38.13%. (The Digital Bloom)