AI Search & AEO Statistics

OpenAI reported roughly 800 million weekly active users for ChatGPT in mid-2025, up from 400 million earlier that year.

Independent tracking studies in 2025 found AI Overviews shown on 47% of tracked keyword queries in the United States.

Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas disclosed 780 million monthly queries in mid-2025, growing more than 20% month over month.

Public studies of Perplexity and Google AI Overviews report a typical citation count of 4 to 7 distinct URLs per generated answer.

Multiple 2025 analytics reports show visitors arriving from ChatGPT and Perplexity convert at 3-5x the rate of average organic sessions, reflecting stronger intent.

As of 2025, roughly a third of the top 1,000 websites disallow GPTBot in robots.txt, removing themselves from the OpenAI citation pool.

Analysis of AEO passages found pages with Article, FAQPage, or HowTo JSON-LD were cited far more often than unstructured equivalents.

Passages quoted by ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews cluster tightly in the 40-80 word range, ideally under 100.

A pillar plus 6-12 spokes with mutual internal links consistently outperforms scattered publishing on the same keyword set.

Largest Contentful Paint above 2.5 seconds is classed as needs improvement; above 4 seconds is poor and drags rankings and AI eligibility.