42 AI Visibility & GEO Statistics for 2026

96% of Spanish B2B SMEs (€1-10M) are invisible in LLMs: they don't appear in the Top 5 of at least 2 of the 4 main engines for discovery queries in their sector.

Source: Citora AI Visibility Index 2026 (n=50 B2B SMEs, 30 queries × 4 LLMs × 3 runs) — methodology at /sources

Domain Authority doesn't apply to ChatGPT: across 6 audits, SMEs of 15-30 employees outrank incumbents of €80M+ with 20 years of SEO, because they hold a consolidated entity (schema + Wikidata + cross-mentions).

Source: 6 Citora audits across Spanish B2B SMEs, March-May 2026 — detail at /sources

Microsoft Copilot cited Citora's pages 24 times in a single month (May 2026), per the domain owner's data in Bing Webmaster Tools.

Source: Bing Webmaster Tools (AI Performance), Citora domain data — see /sources

Of the 175 URLs in our sitemap, Brave Search (the engine behind Claude) had only 2 indexed: 1%. We measured it on our own domain.

Source: Citora's own measurement (site:citora.es on Brave Search, June 2026)

73% of established Spanish B2B companies don't appear in ChatGPT/Perplexity for their sector's queries.

Source: Citora audits (200+ Spanish B2B SMEs over 12 months)

When a B2B SME fails at GEO, 40% is fetchability (AI bots can't read the site), 25% readability, 20% quotability and 15% structure. Content is rarely the first problem.

Source: 22 Citora audits of Spanish B2B SMEs, 2025-2026

About 25% of the citations ChatGPT generates on B2B queries come from Reddit + Wikipedia (≈15% Reddit, ≈10% Wikipedia).

Source: Citora analysis, 240 B2B queries tracked across 4 LLMs, Mar-May 2026

68% of users don't click beyond the AI answer: the value transfers without a visit. (Small panel: n=4 clients.)

Source: Citora primary observation, panel of 4 Spanish B2B clients

11-18 days pass between an AI citing a brand and its first visit in GA4: AI visibility converts on a delay. (Small panel: n=4 clients.)

Source: Citora panel, 4 Spanish B2B clients, 2026

Fewer than 33% of Google searches now end in a click; only ~23% of clicks go to the real open web.

Source: Rand Fishkin + Similarweb, 2026

86% of 500,000 informational prompts trigger an AI Overview.

Source: Lily Ray, 500K-prompt analysis, 2026

93% of queries in Google AI Mode produce zero outbound clicks; AI Mode passed 1B+ users.

Source: Google / Alex Groberman, 2026

AI Overviews now reaches 2.5B monthly active users.

Source: Google + tracking tools, 2026

AI Overviews cut clicks by 60%+ on the traffic Google used to send.

Source: foley_seo, 100M keywords, 2026

Only 38% of AI Overview citations come from the organic top 10 (down from 76% in July 2025 after Gemini 3). The other 62% don't rank top 10.

Source: Ahrefs, January 2026

80% of the sources AI cites are not in Google's top 10.

Source: Seer Interactive, 2025

75% of AI citations go to pages outside Google's top 10; ranking #4 on Google gives just a 2.6% chance of being cited by AI.

Source: Neil Patel, 500 keywords / 4,300 prompts, 2026

AI Overviews reduce the click-through rate of Google's position 1 by 58%.

Source: Ahrefs, 300K keywords, Dec 2025

LinkedIn is the 2nd most-cited domain in AI search: ~11% of answers (ChatGPT 14.3% / AI Mode 13.5% / Perplexity 5.3%).

Source: Semrush, 325K prompts Jan–Feb 2026, 89K LinkedIn URLs

“Best-of” listicles are the most-cited page type in AI: 43.8% of all citations (26,283 URLs); Evertune puts it above 50% on most platforms. Caveat: third-party listicles only, not self-ranking.

Source: jakezward 26K URLs + Evertune 6K + Keval Shah, 2026

In B2B, branded AI citations beat unbranded 14-to-1; 85% of unbranded answers don't include the brand's own site; Reddit drives 20.8% of external citations.

Source: Foundation Marketing, 57.2M citations / 50 brands / 7 B2B verticals, 2026

ChatGPT increasingly names Reddit in its fan-outs — presence went from 0.15% to 3.68% (~24×).

Source: Ann Smarty, 2026

ChatGPT drives ~70% of all AI referral traffic (64.5% of gen-AI search); Gemini overtook Perplexity (8.65%).

Source: Similarweb + Statcounter, March 2026

Anthropic + OpenAI capture 89% of the revenue of the top 34 AI startups (~$80B annualized, +112% in 6 months). GEO priority: Claude + ChatGPT.

Source: The Information via Glenn Gabe, 2026

ChatGPT: 800M weekly users + 50M daily shopping queries.

Source: OpenAI, Sept 2025

Optimizing fluency lifts AI visibility by 15–30%.

Source: Aggarwal et al., KDD 2024

The aggregate lift from GEO techniques ranges 30–115% by method (adding sourced statistics, authority quotations, etc.).

Source: Aggarwal et al., KDD 2024

53% of AI-cited pages have schema (3× more than non-cited), but a controlled 1,885-page test found no causal effect — schema correlates, it doesn't cause.

Source: Ahrefs, 2026

Human content wins the top spots: at Google position 1, there's an 80.5% chance the content is human vs 10% AI (42,000 posts).

Source: Semrush, 2026

Correlation with AI brand visibility: YouTube 0.737 · brand mentions 0.664 · backlinks 0.218.

Source: Ahrefs, 75K brands, 2026

Google pays Reddit ~$60M/year to license its content for training and citation.

Source: Reuters + Reddit SEC 8-K FY2024

The GEO services market grows from $886M (2025) to $7.318B (2031), 34% CAGR.

Source: Valuates Reports via PRNewswire

94% of enterprises are raising GEO budgets in 2026, 93% build it in-house, 97% report positive results.

Source: Conductor, 250+ enterprise leaders, 2026

95% of enterprise AI projects fail.

Source: MIT NANDA, 2025

B2B buying cycle: 22 stakeholders (13 internal + 9 external).

Source: Forrester, 2026 State of Business Buying, 17,500 buyers

95% of B2B purchases go to the vendor on the Day One Shortlist.

Source: 6sense

Traffic from AI converts 42% better than organic (not the “4–7×” of the hype).

Source: Adobe Analytics Q1 2026; corroborated by Siege Media +34%

Low-quality AI content gets deindexed at scale: 87% of 200 articles dropped within a week; one 800-article case lost 86% and -92% traffic (Oct-2025 spam update).

Source: Noel Ceta, real cases

Bots are now 57.3% of web traffic.

Source: Cloudflare, 2026

35.7% of the top 1,000 sites block GPTBot (sometimes unknowingly).

Source: Originality.ai, Aug 2024 (re-verify 2026)

ChatGPT recommends only 1.2% of local businesses (98.8% invisible); barely half of Google local-pack winners appear in AI.

Source: 350,000 local-business study, 2026

Nearly 3 in 4 restaurants (74.9%) visible on Google Maps never appear in AI recommendations; those with 1,000+ reviews are left out 70.9% of the time.

Source: LocalFalcon, Restaurant AI Visibility Index, 2026