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AI Visibility Statistics 2027: The Numbers From 380k AI Answers and 57 Million Citations

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Last updated: October 2026. Next refresh: January 2027.

This is the list of AI visibility statistics I use on stage, in client reviews and in board conversations. It pulls from the research my team at Foundation has published since May 2026 with AirOps. It covers 380,000 logged AI answers across six AI surfaces, 57.2 million citations across seven B2B SaaS verticals, and a set of smaller tests we ran on specific brands and categories. I’ve paired it with the outside research I trust most, from Pew Research, Bain, Ahrefs, Semrush, SparkToro, G2 and Forrester. Every number links to the study it came from.

Two rules for reading it. A citation means an AI surface included a domain as a source in one answer, so these figures measure visibility, never traffic. And the six surfaces behave differently enough that a number averaged across them is usually wrong for every one of them… which is the first finding below.

Want the full dataset behind some of these numbers?

Download The State of B2B AI Discovery 2026, or read the summary on the Foundation Lab.

Key AI visibility statistics

  1. Product and brand pages are the largest single source of citations on all six AI surfaces studied (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overview, Google AI Mode), according to Foundation and AirOps’ State of B2B AI Discovery 2026 study of 380,000 AI answers.
  2. Gemini sends 71.63% of its citations to product domains, the most vendor-heavy share of any AI surface, and no single third-party domain appears in even 14% of Gemini’s answers (Foundation × AirOps, 2026).
  3. Social domains such as YouTube and LinkedIn receive about 7% of citations on Google’s AI Overview and AI Mode, but 0.3% or less on ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude, a gap of roughly 27x between AI Overview and ChatGPT (Foundation × AirOps, 2026).
  4. Google users who saw an AI summary clicked a traditional search result in 8% of visits, against 15% for users who didn’t see one, and clicked a link inside the summary in just 1% of visits (Pew Research Center, 2025).
  5. ChatGPT gives 9.26% of its citations to community domains, driven almost entirely by Reddit; Claude gives 2.67% (Foundation × AirOps, 2026).
  6. Only 10.15% of the 57.2 million AI citations in Foundation’s B2B SaaS analysis pointed to brand-owned domains, and in 68% of AI answers the brand’s own content didn’t appear at all (Foundation, 2026).
  7. Reddit (21%), YouTube (13%) and LinkedIn (13%) are the most-cited off-site sources in AI answers to B2B software prompts (Foundation Hidden Selection Phase research, 2026).
  8. About 80% of consumers rely on zero-click results in at least 40% of their searches, and about 60% of searches now end without the user going on to another site (Bain & Company, 2025).
  9. The share of AI citations going to review sites swings 3.3x by software category, from 7.64% for managed databases to 25.07% for applicant tracking systems; community share swings 2.5x, from 5.5% for SEO platforms to 13.89% for EDR/XDR security tools (Foundation × AirOps, 2026).
  10. G2 appears in roughly a quarter to a third of citing answers on five of the six AI surfaces, making it the one third-party domain nearly every surface cites heavily (Foundation × AirOps, 2026).
  11. In a test of one B2B buying prompt run 11 times, Gong appeared in all 11 AI answers and was recommended in 3; showing up and being chosen are different outcomes (Foundation, August 2026).
  12. AI Overviews cut the organic click-through rate for the position-one result by 58%, based on 300,000 keywords compared between December 2023 and December 2025 (Ahrefs, 2026).
  13. Only two of six AI surfaces used ClickUp’s own category label (“Converged AI Workspace”) across 252 answers; AI surfaces pull category language from the sources they retrieve (Foundation Model Drift test, October 2026).
  14. Four applicant-tracking vendors (Greenhouse, Ashby, Lever, Workable) owned just 27% of the 2,695 source presences behind 240 AI answers comparing them; 73% of the sources came from outside the four vendors (Foundation, October 2026).
  15. YouTube mentions have a 0.737 correlation with AI visibility, the strongest relationship among the factors Foundation studied, ahead of Domain Rating and backlinks (Foundation, 2026).
  16. Branded web mentions show a 0.664 correlation with brand visibility in Google’s AI Overviews, roughly three times the correlation for backlinks (0.218), across 75,000 brands (Ahrefs, 2025).
  17. Only about 10% of Google AI Mode citations match Google’s organic results (Moz), ChatGPT’s sources overlap with Google 39% of the time (Profound), and just 12% of URLs cited by LLMs rank in Google’s top 10 for the original prompt (Ahrefs), as collected in Foundation’s GEO guide.
  18. 82% of B2B software buyers have sourced software recommendations from an AI chatbot in the last 24 months (G2 2026 Buyer Behavior Report, 1,000 buyers, cited by Foundation).
Source type ChatGPT Gemini Perplexity Google AI Mode Google AI Overview Claude
Products 55.55% 71.63% 51.74% 60.42% 61.54% 60.58%
Reviews 15.90% 11.02% 19.96% 8.83% 9.49% 20.99%
Communities 9.26% 5.27% 6.88% 9.57% 8.47% 2.67%
Social 0.26% 0.28% 2.28% 6.91% 6.95% 0.15%
Educational 5.72% 3.06% 4.58% 3.86% 3.66% 4.22%
Media 4.91% 3.12% 3.25% 3.90% 3.50% 3.82%
Citation share by source type across six AI surfaces, June 22 to July 24, 2026 (Foundation × AirOps). Uncategorized citations excluded.

AI visibility statistics by AI surface

The September report’s main finding is that AI answers run on two systems. Google’s AI Overview and AI Mode build answers from Google’s live index; ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity are standalone assistants with their own retrieval and training data. The numbers below are grouped that way.

ChatGPT AI Visibility Stats

  1. ChatGPT gives 9.26% of its citations to community domains, almost all of it Reddit, a share that rivals Google’s AI surfaces (Foundation × AirOps, 2026).
  2. ChatGPT cited 20 Reddit links across 42 answers in Foundation’s six-surface ClickUp test, compared with 24 each for Google AI Overview and AI Mode (Foundation, October 2026).
  3. ChatGPT’s cited sources overlap with Google’s organic results 39% of the time (Profound, cited in Foundation’s GEO guide).
  4. ChatGPT’s share of AI prompt volume fell from 70% to 50% over 2026 while Gemini and Claude grew (Comscore Q2 2026 AI Intelligence Report, cited by Foundation).
  5. ChatGPT cut its Reddit citation rate roughly in half in one month, from 21.41% of citing answers in July to 10.05% in August, and has held near 3% weekly since August 17; G2 overtook Reddit as its most-cited domain (Foundation × AirOps full report, 2026).
  6. Only 8% of ChatGPT’s in-text citations point to pages ranking in Google’s top 10 for the same prompt, across 15,000 prompts (Ahrefs, 2025).

Claude AI Visibility Stats

  1. Claude gives 2.67% of its citations to community domains and 0.3% or less to social domains (Foundation × AirOps, 2026).
  2. Claude cited zero Reddit links in the 252-answer ClickUp test, the only surface to cite none (Foundation, October 2026).
  3. Claude was one of only two surfaces (with ChatGPT) to use ClickUp’s own category label in both test runs (Foundation, October 2026).
  4. Claude’s share of AI prompt volume rose from 2% to 11% over 2026 (Comscore Q2 2026, cited by Foundation).
  5. Claude gives 20.99% of its citations to review sites, the highest of any surface, and its third-party reach is review platforms only: G2 29.85%, Capterra 13.12%, Gartner 8.79%, PeerSpot 8.60%, TrustRadius 4.99%, with Reddit, YouTube and LinkedIn absent (Foundation × AirOps full report, 2026).

Gemini AI Visibility Stats

  1. Gemini sends 71.63% of its citations to product domains, the highest share of any surface (Foundation × AirOps, 2026).
  2. No single third-party domain appears in even 14% of Gemini’s answers, against G2’s quarter-to-a-third reach on the other five surfaces (Foundation × AirOps, 2026).
  3. Gemini cited 2 Reddit links across 42 ClickUp answers (Foundation, October 2026).
  4. Gemini’s share of AI prompt volume rose from 17% to 30% over 2026 (Comscore Q2 2026, cited by Foundation).
  5. YouTube holds just 0.33% of Gemini’s citation share, and G2 is the external domain Gemini reaches most, at 13.59% of citing answers (Foundation × AirOps full report, 2026).
  6. Only 8.6% of Gemini’s citations point to pages ranking in Google’s top 10 for the same prompt (Ahrefs, 2025).

Perplexity AI Visibility Stats

  1. Perplexity is the assistant most aligned with Google: 28.6% of its citations, nearly 1 in 3, point to pages ranking in Google’s top 10 for the same prompt, against about 8% for the others (Ahrefs, 2025).
  2. Perplexity cited 4 Reddit links across 42 ClickUp answers (Foundation, October 2026).
  3. Perplexity gives 19.96% of its citations to review sites and reaches Capterra in 15.09% of citing answers, more than triple ChatGPT’s 4.06%; Gartner barely registers (Foundation × AirOps full report, 2026).
  4. Perplexity recorded the highest measured brand sentiment of the six surfaces (80.91 out of 100) and Claude the lowest (69.05) for the June 22 to July 24 window; these are measured scores on one prompt set, not a statement about either provider’s disposition (Foundation × AirOps full report, 2026).

Google AI Overview AI Visibility Stats

  1. AI Overviews reduce the click-through rate for the top-ranking page by 58%; position-one CTR on AI Overview keywords fell from 7.3% to 1.6% between December 2023 and December 2025 (Ahrefs, 2026).
  2. About 7% of Google AI Overview’s citations go to social domains such as YouTube and LinkedIn, roughly 27 times ChatGPT’s share (Foundation × AirOps, 2026).
  3. Google AI Overview cited 24 Reddit links and exposed 23 direct YouTube links across 42 ClickUp answers (Foundation, October 2026).
  4. Google AI Overview doesn’t trigger for every query, so its answer volume differs structurally from the standalone assistants (Foundation × AirOps methodology note, 2026).
  5. YouTube appears in 37.86% of Google AI Overview’s citing answers and Reddit in 39.01% (Foundation × AirOps full report, 2026).
  6. When Google shows an AI summary, users click a link inside it in just 1% of visits (Pew Research Center, 2025).

Google AI Mode AI Visibility Stats

  1. Only about 10% of Google AI Mode citations match Google’s organic results (Moz, cited in Foundation’s GEO guide).
  2. Google AI Mode cited 24 Reddit links and exposed 36 direct YouTube links across 42 ClickUp answers, the most YouTube of any surface (Foundation, October 2026).
  3. YouTube appears in 47.02% of Google AI Mode’s citing answers and Reddit in 52.15%, the highest reach for either domain on any surface (Foundation × AirOps full report, 2026).
AI surface Reddit links Direct YouTube links
Google AI Overview 24 23
Google AI Mode 24 36
ChatGPT 20 Not published
Perplexity 4 Not published
Gemini 2 Not published
Claude 0 Not published
Reddit and YouTube links cited per AI surface, 42 answers each (Foundation ClickUp test, October 2026)
Platform Start of 2026 Q2 2026
ChatGPT 70% 50%
Gemini 17% 30%
Claude 2% 11%
AI prompt volume share by platform over 2026 (Comscore Q2 2026, via Foundation)

AI visibility statistics by source type

Foundation’s taxonomy sorts every cited domain into products (vendor sites, tool directories, comparison pages), reviews (G2, Capterra, TrustRadius), communities (Reddit, forums), social (YouTube, LinkedIn), educational (Gartner), media (Medium, Slashdot) and an uncategorized bucket. The split between those buckets is where the surfaces diverge.

Product and brand pages

  1. Product and brand pages are the single biggest source of citations on every AI surface tracked, whether the buyer is on ChatGPT or on Google’s AI Overview (Foundation × AirOps, 2026).
  2. B2B software leads every vertical in AirOps’ cross-vertical analysis with a 68.4% brand-and-product citation share, ahead of HR and workforce (67.5%) and legal services (60.6%), and roughly double travel (33.5%) (AirOps, May to June 2026, cited by Foundation).
  3. “Editorial gets the budget; product pages get the citations,” per James Scherer, VP of Strategy at Foundation, summarizing why product, comparison and use-case pages do most of the citation work (Foundation × AirOps, 2026).
  4. Product domains account for between 51.74% (Perplexity) and 71.63% (Gemini) of citation share depending on the surface, and of the 100 most-cited URLs in the dataset, 59 were comparison pages and 25 were listicles, together accounting for 66,232 citation events (Foundation × AirOps full report, 2026).
Vertical Brand and product citation share
B2B software 68.4%
HR and workforce 67.5%
Legal services 60.6%
Travel 33.5%
Brand and product citation share by vertical (AirOps, May to June 2026). AirOps’ taxonomy differs from the six-surface study, so these shares aren’t directly comparable.

Review sites

  1. G2 appears in roughly a quarter to a third of citing answers on five of six AI surfaces; Gemini is the exception (Foundation × AirOps, 2026).
  2. Review sites’ share of citations ranges from 7.64% (managed databases) to 25.07% (applicant tracking systems) across the six representative categories published (Foundation × AirOps, 2026).
  3. G2 is the second-largest external domain in the dataset at 4.13% of all citation events, and review sites take between 8.83% (Google AI Mode) and 20.99% (Claude) of citations depending on the surface (Foundation × AirOps full report, 2026).

Communities

  1. Community domains take 9.26% of ChatGPT’s citations and 2.67% of Claude’s; Reddit drives nearly all of it (Foundation × AirOps, 2026).
  2. Community share by category ranges from 5.5% for SEO platforms to 13.89% for EDR/XDR security tools (Foundation × AirOps, 2026).
  3. Reddit is the most-cited off-site source in AI answers to B2B software prompts, at 21% of off-site citations in Foundation’s Hidden Selection Phase research (Foundation, June 2026).
  4. Reddit is the top external domain across the six surfaces with 158,857 citations, a 4.78% share, spread across 12,561 distinct URLs (Foundation × AirOps full report, 2026).

Social and video

  1. Social domains take about 7% of citations on Google’s AI Overview and AI Mode and 0.3% or less on ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude (Foundation × AirOps, 2026).
  2. YouTube (13%) and LinkedIn (13%) are the second- and third-most-cited off-site sources for B2B software prompts after Reddit (Foundation, June 2026).
  3. In the Productivity vertical, YouTube recorded the highest single-source citation share of any vertical in Foundation’s 57.2 million citation study (Foundation, May 2026).

Educational, media and comparison sites

  1. In Fintech, comparison and affiliate sites (NerdWallet, Bankrate) had the highest concentration of citations of any vertical studied; in Healthcare, clinical and academic institutions shape perceived authority; in DevOps, developer communities do (Foundation, May 2026).
  2. Educational and media domains (Gartner, Medium, Slashdot) take 3% to 6% of citations on every surface, and Gartner’s reach is negligible on Perplexity (Foundation × AirOps full report, 2026).

AI visibility statistics by software category

  1. Foundation tracks 81 B2B software categories; six are published as representative: applicant tracking and recruiting, CI/CD, SEO platforms, EDR/XDR, managed databases, and employee engagement and culture (Foundation × AirOps, 2026).
  2. Reviews’ share of citations swings 3.3x across those six categories and community share swings 2.5x, which is why a playbook copied from another category can fund the wrong channel (Foundation × AirOps, 2026).
  3. Applicant tracking has the highest review-site share of any published category at 25.07%; managed databases has the lowest at 7.64% (Foundation × AirOps, 2026).
  4. EDR/XDR security tooling has the highest community share of any published category at 13.89%; SEO platforms the lowest at 5.5% (Foundation × AirOps, 2026).
  5. Every B2B SaaS vertical has its own citation fingerprint: Fintech is shaped by comparison sites, DevOps by developer communities, Healthcare by clinical institutions, across 57.2 million citations on five platforms over 60 days (Foundation, May 2026).
  6. CI/CD (11.53% community vs 8.33% reviews) and managed databases (13.33% vs 7.64%) lean toward community sources, while applicant tracking (25.07% vs 8.05%), SEO platforms (20.53% vs 5.50%) and engagement and culture (18.11% vs 5.54%) lean toward review sites (Foundation × AirOps full report, 2026).
Category Reviews share Communities share
Applicant tracking / recruiting 25.07% 8.05%
SEO platforms 20.53% 5.50%
Engagement and culture 18.11% 5.54%
EDR/XDR security 17.89% 13.89%
CI/CD 8.33% 11.53%
Managed databases 7.64% 13.33%
Review-site and community citation share by software category (Foundation × AirOps, 2026)

Reddit, YouTube and G2 statistics

Three domains come up in every client conversation, so they get their own block.

Reddit AI Visibility Stats

  1. Reddit is the most-cited off-site source for B2B software prompts at 21% of off-site citations (Foundation, June 2026).
  2. In Foundation’s ClickUp test, Google AI Overview and AI Mode each cited 24 Reddit links, ChatGPT 20, Perplexity 4, Gemini 2 and Claude 0 across 42 answers per surface (Foundation, October 2026).
  3. Of 100 priority Reddit threads being cited by LLMs for one Foundation client, 22 were locked or archived, meaning competitors owned the narrative with no way to participate; Foundation replaced 14 of them with new threads (Foundation, July 2026).
  4. The same client’s brand mentions in those 100 priority threads rose from 12 to 73, and it now appears above competitors in 53 of them (Foundation, July 2026).
  5. Reddit outranks every B2B vendor on 957,000 monthly searches in Foundation’s earlier B2B search analysis (Foundation Lab).

YouTube AI Visibility Stats

  1. YouTube mentions have a 0.737 correlation with AI visibility, the strongest factor measured, ahead of Domain Rating and backlinks (Foundation, August 2026).
  2. YouTube ranks in Google’s top 10 for 4 out of 5 B2B SaaS “demo” searches and outranked three or more vendors across 1,723 keywords (Foundation, August 2026).
  3. Google AI Mode exposed 36 direct YouTube links and AI Overview 23 across 42 ClickUp answers each (Foundation, October 2026).
  4. YouTube reaches 47.02% of Google AI Mode’s citing answers, 37.86% of AI Overview’s and 12.10% of Perplexity’s, but holds just 0.33% of Gemini’s citation share (Foundation × AirOps full report, 2026).
AI surface YouTube reach
Google AI Mode 47.02%
Google AI Overview 37.86%
Perplexity 12.10%
ChatGPT Not cited
Gemini Not cited (0.33% citation share)
Claude Not cited
Share of citing answers that include YouTube, by AI surface (Foundation × AirOps, June 22 to July 24, 2026)

G2 AI Visibility Stats

  1. G2 appears in roughly a quarter to a third of citing answers on five of six AI surfaces, which is why Foundation tells clients to treat the G2 profile as owned media (Foundation × AirOps, 2026).
  2. 82% of B2B software buyers have sourced recommendations from an AI chatbot in the last two years (G2), and 69% say AI led them to a different vendor than the one they planned to choose (buyer research cited by Foundation).

Buyer behaviour statistics

  1. 82% of B2B software buyers have sourced software recommendations from an AI chatbot in the last 24 months (G2 2026 Buyer Behavior Report, survey of 1,000 B2B software buyers, cited by Foundation).
  2. Review sites (38%) overtook AI chatbots (37%) as the top source shaping which vendors make a B2B software buyer’s shortlist, the first time that has happened in G2’s research (G2, 2026).
  3. 61% of B2B software buyers use or plan to use AI agents as part of the buying process (G2, 2026).
  4. Generative AI tools were the single most cited meaningful interaction type for researching business purchases, and buying groups double in size for purchases that include generative AI features (Forrester State of Business Buying 2026, via Digital Commerce 360).
  5. 36% of business buyers said generative AI made them more confident in their decision, while 20% said they were less confident because they hit unreliable or inaccurate information (Forrester, 2026).
  6. 71% of software buyers rely on AI chatbots for software research, up from roughly 60% seven months earlier; 51% start their research with an AI chatbot more often than with Google (buyer research cited in Foundation’s Hidden Selection Phase analysis, 2026).
  7. 69% of buyers say AI led them to select a different vendor than they initially planned (buyer research cited by Foundation, 2026).
  8. 13% of Docebo’s high-intent leads come through AI discovery, per its VP of Revenue Marketing, one of the few first-party AI-to-pipeline figures published by a B2B vendor (cited by Foundation, July 2026).
  9. The average AI search visitor is worth 4.4 times the average traditional organic visitor, based on conversion rate (Semrush, 2025).
  10. Zero-click behaviour is cutting organic web traffic by an estimated 15% to 25% (Bain & Company, 2025).

Mention vs recommendation statistics

  1. Gong appeared in 11 of 11 AI answers to the same buying prompt and was recommended in 3; most brands only track the first number (Foundation, August 2026).
  2. Nearly 90% of the citations in those answers pointed to sources outside the vendor’s own website (Foundation, August 2026).
  3. When Rand Fishkin and Patrick O’Donnell ran 2,961 identical prompts across ChatGPT, Claude and Google’s AI, the odds of the same prompt returning the same list of recommended brands twice were under 1 in 100 (SparkToro, cited by Foundation).
  4. Models inferred requirements users hadn’t specified in 41.1% of cases in a study of underspecified prompts (Yang et al., Findings of ACL 2026, cited by Foundation).
  5. Only two of six AI surfaces repeated a vendor’s own category language across two runs of 21 prompts, and category descriptions shifted between surfaces (Foundation Model Drift test, October 2026).
Outcome AI answers
Mentioned 11 of 11
Recommended 3 of 11
Gong across 11 runs of one buying prompt (Foundation, August 2026)

Search vs AI overlap statistics

  1. Only about 10% of Google AI Mode citations match Google’s organic results (Moz, cited in Foundation’s GEO guide).
  2. ChatGPT’s chosen sources overlap with Google’s results 39% of the time (Profound, cited in Foundation’s GEO guide).
  3. Just 12% of URLs cited by LLMs rank in Google’s top 10 for the original prompt (Ahrefs, cited in Foundation’s GEO guide).
  4. AI doesn’t need a page to be popular or well-linked to use it: Lever’s own comparison page was used in 27 AI answers and Ashby’s in 18, and none of the six ATS matchups was led by a first-party comparison page (Foundation, October 2026).
  5. AI search could send more visitors to websites than traditional search for digital marketing and SEO topics by early 2028, on Semrush’s projection (Semrush, 2025).
  6. Branded web mentions (0.664), branded anchors (0.527) and branded search volume (0.392) all correlate more strongly with AI Overview visibility than Domain Rating (0.326) or backlinks (0.218) (Ahrefs, 2025).

AI visibility measurement statistics

  1. Roughly half of all domains cited by AI change month to month, which Foundation calls citation drift and why a one-time audit is a snapshot rather than a measurement (Foundation GEO Metrics guide).
  2. Clio holds a 32% to 47% share of model across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, Foundation’s published example of what cross-platform leadership looks like (Foundation GEO Metrics guide).
  3. Foundation’s measurement framework has three pillars: visibility (do they see me), citation (do they trust me) and sentiment (do they like me) (Foundation GEO Metrics guide).
  4. A single blended AI visibility score can look healthy on one surface while the brand is missing from another; Foundation recommends tracking citation rate and citation share separately for each of the six surfaces (Foundation × AirOps, 2026).

How these numbers were collected

The six-surface figures come from The State of B2B AI Discovery 2026, a joint Foundation and AirOps study.

AirOps ran the tracking behind roughly 380,000 logged AI answers to commercial-intent B2B software prompts across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overview and Google AI Mode from June 22 to July 24, 2026. Foundation built the prompt library across 81 software categories, classified about three million citation events by domain, page type and sentiment, and wrote the analysis. Google AI Overview doesn’t trigger for every query, so its answer volume differs structurally from the four standalone assistants.

Foundation has a commercial relationship with AirOps.

The vertical fingerprint figures come from a separate 60-day, five-platform study of 57.2 million citations across seven B2B SaaS verticals, also with AirOps. The ClickUp, ATS and Gong figures come from smaller manual tests Foundation ran in 2026 (21 prompts, 20 prompts and one prompt respectively), each run twice.

Third-party figures from Pew Research, Bain, Ahrefs, Semrush, SparkToro, G2, Forrester, Comscore and the ACL paper link to the original studies; the Moz and Profound figures are reproduced as Foundation’s GEO guide cited them.

A citation means an AI surface included a domain as a source in one answer.

None of these numbers measure traffic, clicks or revenue.

Sources

Cite this page: Ross Simmonds, “AI Visibility Statistics 2027,” rosssimmonds.com, October 2026.