Generative AI traffic hits 9.5bn visits a month, Similarweb finds
Nine and a half billion. That is the average monthly web visits generative AI platforms drew between June 2025 and May 2026, according to Similarweb, a 70% increase year on year. Unique visitors rose 57% to 655 million, and mobile app downloads grew 58% to 4.4 billion, pushing AI tools into everyday use for work, study, shopping and creative tasks. ChatGPT still leads on web traffic, but its share keeps slipping as Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and DeepSeek pick up users. On mobile, ChatGPT remains dominant while Gemini and Grok post the strongest growth. Advertising inside ChatGPT is expanding across major markets: nearly two-thirds of ad impressions land after a user's second prompt, when the conversation has already revealed intent, and 65% of sessions continue afterward with a click-through rate near 0.5%.
Brand visibility inside AI answers now carries a measurable payoff: users visit brands mentioned in an AI response two to four times more often than unmentioned rivals, though the sources AI systems draw on vary by category, e-commerce listings in beauty, reviews and user content in travel, specialized publishers in finance. Winning that visibility takes more than ad spend. Gemini logged the sharpest rise in PPC spending, yet Claude posted stronger organic growth on a smaller budget, a sign that product quality and user experience decide who gets recommended as much as media budgets do. Agencies planning search and content strategy now need a presence in the sources AI systems cite for their category, alongside traditional SEO and paid search.