Google's AI Overviews turn up in 43% of searches now, against 15% a year ago, according to Similarweb's 2026 generative AI report. AI Mode is picking up the traffic Overviews hands off, climbing from 126 million visits last June to 279 million in May, and the average Google query has gotten longer as people write for a machine that answers rather than one that lists links. Citations are more common than they were, up more than fivefold over the year, though only 6.8% of US ChatGPT desktop queries produced a cited answer by May 2026, with retail, travel, and sports faring better than most. Publishers got one break, since a May 7 ChatGPT search update pushed the share of US desktop visits that actually landed on a webpage from 25% in March to nearly 60% by the end of May.
