78 SEO Statistics for 2026

ByShane Tran Updated on

SEO in 2026 is a two-front game. Google search still dominates website traffic, but AI is changing how people find and choose what to click.

Here are 78 SEO statistics that show where things stand right now.

Featured SEO Statistics

  • Gartner predicts traditional search engine volume will drop 25% by 2026, as AI chatbots and virtual agents capture market share from search marketing. (Gartner)
  • 75% of searchers never go past the first page of search results. (HubSpot)
  • 30% of B2B marketers rank website, blog, and SEO in their top three channels 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 to the top-ranking page by 58%. (Ahrefs)

Search Engine Statistics

  • Google has 91.31% 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’s search index is well over 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. (Exploding Topics)
  • 94.74% of keywords get ten monthly searches or fewer. (Ahrefs)
  • Over half 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)

Technical SEO Statistics

  • 95.2% of sites have 3XX redirect issues. (Ahrefs)
  • 72.3% of sites have slow pages. (Ahrefs)
  • Nearly 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)
  • Google holds 95.82% of the global mobile search market. (Statcounter)
  • Google uses mobile-first indexing for 100% of websites. (Google)
  • 5.83 billion people use a mobile phone today, which equates to 70.4% 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 dedicated 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 who use AI platforms 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 via Search Engine Journal)
  • 83% of video results in Google’s search carousel come from YouTube, based on a 2020 study. (Perficient via Search Engine Land)
  • 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 52%, 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 via Search Engine Journal)
  • The median age of YouTube videos in the top three ranking positions is 29 months. (Adilo via Search Engine Journal)

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. (First Page Sage)
  • In 2024, ChatGPT held a 3.2% B2B search engine market share with a 14% annual user growth rate. (First Page Sage)
  • In B2B industries, organic search generates 52.7% 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 by volume are branded. (Ahrefs)
  • 51% of B2B software buyers start their research with an AI chatbot more often than Google. (G2)
  • 40% of B2B marketers say creating content that prompts a desired action is their biggest content challenge. (Content Marketing Institute)

AI SEO Statistics

  • Google AI Overviews now reach over 2.5 billion monthly users. (Google)
  • Google AI Mode surpassed one billion monthly users just one year after its debut, with queries more than doubling every quarter. (Google)
  • In January 2025, 91.3% of queries triggering AI Overviews had informational intent — but by October 2025, that share dropped to 57.1%. (Semrush)
  • AI Overviews grew an average of 71% on SERPs with commercial intent between November 2025 and April 2026, based on an analysis of over 600,000 keywords across 10 industries. (Semrush)
  • 45% of marketing leaders cannot accurately measure their brand visibility in AI-generated answers, and only 9% have tools to track all relevant metrics. (Semrush)
  • ChatGPT cites an average of 15 sources per response, while Gemini cites an average of 3 sources per response. (Semrush)
  • YouTube is the most-cited domain in Google AI Overviews, capturing 21.1% of all citations across 3 million US queries. (Ahrefs)
  • 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 Marketing)
  • 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)
  • Only 38% of AI Overview citations come from pages that rank in Google’s top 10 — down from 76% in July 2025. (Ahrefs via Search Engine Journal)
  • 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)
  • 97% of llms.txt files received zero traffic in May 2026, despite 28% of domains tracked by Ahrefs publishing one. (Ahrefs)
  • AI agent requests have reached 88% of human organic search activity. (BrightEdge)
  • Only 19% of websites have specific directives for ChatGPT-related bots. (BrightEdge)

Conclusion

SEO in 2026 is no longer just about ranking on Google. AI search is growing fast, but traditional search still drives the vast majority of traffic, and the fundamentals still determine who shows up in both channels.