Written by Admin Alex · Fact-Checked by M.Ali · Info Verified September 2026
We review and update this article regularly as new information becomes available.
TL;DR: Google’s AI Overviews now appear in 39.4% of U.S. desktop searches, up from 25.8% a year ago, while ChatGPT’s share of the AI-answers market has dropped from 70% to 50% since January as Gemini and Claude eat into its lead.
Google’s results pages have been quietly turning from lists of links into answer pages, and the newest measurement shows how far that shift has actually gone. Comscore’s Q2 2026 AI Intelligence Report found AI Overviews attached to 39.4% of U.S. desktop searches in June, up from 25.8% in the same month a year earlier. That’s close to a 14 percentage point jump in twelve months, and it happened on top of a search market that itself kept growing rather than shrinking.
Desktop search volume overall hit 77 billion queries in the second quarter of 2026, 8% higher than the 71 billion recorded two years earlier. Google isn’t layering AI summaries onto a shrinking pie. It’s adding them to a slice that’s expanding, which is exactly why the shift matters so much to any website that depends on click-through traffic from search results.
Google isn’t alone in making this move. Microsoft’s Bing, through its Copilot Search feature, reached 17.3% of desktop searches in June, up from 11.8% a year prior. Both companies are heading in the same direction at once: fewer blue links up top, more synthesized answers sitting above them.
The Comscore report also breaks down which sites actually get cited inside those AI answers, and the pattern skews heavily toward a handful of platforms. YouTube shows up constantly, leading citations in entertainment, retail, and financial services queries. Wikipedia takes the top spot for sports-related answers, and Reddit lands in the mix too, ranking third for entertainment and retail citations and fifth for sports. For a typical retail search, the citation split looks like this: YouTube pulls 23%, Amazon 14%, Reddit 12%, and Wikipedia 11%.
Travel sites got the roughest deal in the data. Tripadvisor showed up as an underlying source in 61% of relevant AI answers but received a visible citation only 21% of the time. Hotels.com and Expedia saw similar gaps, source presence in the high 40s to 50%, visible citation in the high teens. In plain terms, these sites are feeding the answer without getting much credit, or traffic, back.
The bigger shakeup, though, is happening one layer up, in which AI assistant people actually open to ask a question in the first place. ChatGPT’s share of AI-answer traffic fell from 70% in January to 50% in June, a 20 point drop in six months. Google’s Gemini nearly doubled its share over the same stretch, climbing from 17% to 30%. Anthropic’s Claude grew from a sliver, 2%, up to 11%. Microsoft’s Copilot held roughly flat at 5%.
Put those two trends side by side and the picture gets clearer. Search engines are absorbing more of the ask-a-question-get-an-answer behavior that used to send people to standalone chatbots, and OpenAI’s early lead in that category is eroding faster than most people expected even six months ago. Google, by building AI answers directly into a product most Americans already open every day, has a distribution advantage a standalone app simply can’t match.
