Google’s AI search is rapidly becoming the default, new data shows

Google search doesn't look like Google search anymore. New numbers from Similarweb show AI Overviews appeared in just 15% of queries a year ago; now they're showing up in 43% of them. That's not a gradual creep, that's a takeover.

And it's not stopping at the overview box. Google is funneling people straight from those AI summaries into AI Mode, its more chatty, conversational search product. Visits to AI Mode jumped from 126 million in June 2025 to 279 million by May 2026. People are also typing differently: search queries are getting longer, reading more like questions you'd ask a person than the clipped keyword strings we've used for two decades. Google isn't just answering questions anymore. It's becoming the place where the whole research session happens, start to finish.

That's great for Google's engagement metrics. It's brutal for the people whose content actually built the index in the first place. Publishers have watched referral traffic evaporate as AI answers cite them without sending a single click their way. Cloudflare has stepped in with tools letting sites block AI crawlers outright unless companies pay to access the content through its marketplace — a sign of how adversarial this relationship has become.

There's a little good news buried in the data. Citations in AI answers have grown more than fivefold over the year, though the base is still tiny: only 6.8% of ChatGPT desktop queries in the US included a citation as of May 2026, and that varies wildly by topic — travel and retail queries get cited far more than most. ChatGPT referral traffic also improved sharply after a May 7 update, with the share of visits actually landing on a webpage jumping from 25% in March to nearly 60% by the end of May.

But none of that changes the trajectory. Google spent twenty-five years training the internet to think of it as a doorway to everything else. Now it's quietly becoming the room you never leave.