Similarweb has just released its 2026 Generative AI Landscape: The Evolution of AI Search, one of the most comprehensive looks yet at how AI is reshaping the way people find information, compare products, and choose brands.
The headline isn’t simply that AI is growing. It’s that discovery itself is changing. People no longer rely on a single destination to find things. They move between AI assistants, search, social platforms, and shopping experiences, often in the same journey. For marketers, that shifts the question from “where do we rank” to “are we discoverable wherever decisions get made.”
Here are the highlights that matter most, and what we think you should do about them.
Generative AI is now a core layer of the internet
The scale is hard to overstate. According to Similarweb, generative AI platforms drew an average of 9.5 billion monthly web visits between June 2025 and May 2026, up 70% year over year. Monthly unique visitors climbed 57% to 655 million, and app downloads rose 58% to 4.4 billion.
To put that in context, AI chatbots are now growing faster than any other major web category. Over the same period, unique visitors to AI chatbots grew 57%, while Search grew just 2%, Social and eCommerce around 7% each, and News actually declined. AI has gone from an emerging category to one of the internet’s fastest-growing destinations in the space of a year.
Discovery is moving well beyond chatbots
The bigger story is where AI is showing up. It’s no longer confined to standalone assistants. AI-powered discovery is now embedded across the platforms people already use every day: Google AI Overviews and AI Mode in search, Alexa for Shopping (formerly Rufus) on Amazon, Meta AI across Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp and Messenger, plus productivity tools, browsers, and Shopify’s own AI assistant.
Meta AI alone illustrates the pace. Its publicly reported monthly users roughly tripled in 18 months, reaching an estimated 1.2 billion. As Similarweb puts it, search is becoming less about where people go and more about how information finds them.
AI hasn’t replaced search. It sits alongside it
One of the most reassuring findings for marketers: AI is additive, not a replacement. Similarweb found that 95% of ChatGPT users also use Google. There’s also heavy overlap between ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude, which tells us people are experimenting with multiple tools rather than committing to one.
Search behaviour is shifting too. Since Google’s AI Mode launched, the average Google search has been getting longer, as people bring chatbot-style prompting habits into the search bar. Instead of short keyword fragments, users are typing fuller, more conversational questions. For anyone producing content, that reinforces a clear direction: content that answers real, natural-language questions is better positioned to be found, whether the query lands in Google or an AI assistant.
AI visibility is the new battleground, and it’s category-specific
This is where the report gets most actionable. AI visibility is becoming a genuine competitive edge, but there’s no universal playbook. The brands winning today are the ones that have built real authority within their specific category.
In beauty, for example, Similarweb’s visibility index shows CeraVe leading, followed by Ulta, Sephora, La Roche-Posay, and The Ordinary. Finance and travel have their own distinct leaders. The pattern is consistent: depth and relevance in your niche are what get you surfaced.
The sources AI trusts also vary sharply by category. Beauty answers lean heavily on e-commerce and retailer pages, travel answers draw on reviews and user-generated content, and finance answers pull from specialist financial publishers. In other words, the content that earns you visibility in one category may be almost irrelevant in another. Winning in AI means understanding what your category’s AI answers actually cite.
Being recommended by AI drives real visits
If there was any doubt that visibility translates into business impact, this figure settles it. Similarweb found that users are two to four times more likely to visit an AI-recommended brand than a competitor that wasn’t mentioned.
AI won’t decide every purchase. But it is increasingly shaping the shortlist, and that influence outlasts the conversation. A shopper may close the chat, but the brand they were pointed toward stays with them. As SparkToro’s Rand Fishkin notes in the report, this echoes how advertisers once measured billboard or TV lift through store visits. The influence is real; what has to change is how marketers measure and attribute it.
AI is citing the web more, which is good news for content
AI platforms are increasingly pulling live information from the web to answer questions. The share of ChatGPT answers containing citations has grown more than fivefold in under a year. Citation rates are highest in exactly the categories where people research before buying: travel, retail, and sports lead, all well above the overall average.
The takeaway is encouraging for anyone investing in content. As AI leans harder on live web sources, well-structured, authoritative content has more chances than ever to be pulled into AI answers.
The most important insight: AI visibility rests on SEO fundamentals
If you take one thing from this report, make it this. Most AI search products rely on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), which means they retrieve live content from search indexes before generating an answer. In practice, that makes AI visibility dependent on your visibility in traditional search.
As Amsive’s Lily Ray explains in the report, if your organic visibility dips, your AI visibility tends to follow, because models are simply less likely to retrieve your content. GEO (generative engine optimization) is a new layer on top of SEO, but the foundations are the same: genuinely useful content and solid technical health. Notably, some brands that rushed low-quality, AI-generated content to chase AI visibility ended up damaging their SEO and their AI presence at once. There’s no shortcut around quality.
New behaviours worth planning for
A few shifts in the report are worth building into your roadmap:
- Homepages are becoming the front door. After a ChatGPT update in May 2026, the share of AI referrals landing on homepages jumped from around 25% to nearly 60%. AI is increasingly sending people to brands, not just individual pages, so your whole site experience needs to be ready to convert.
- Citations and clicks live on different pages. Similarweb found most cited URLs sit two or three folders deep, while most referral traffic lands on homepages. As Orainti’s Aleyda Solis points out, that means two jobs: strengthen the deeper pages that feed AI answers, and make your top-level pages persuasive and conversion-ready.
- AI advertising is arriving. ChatGPT ads are already appearing in a rising share of conversations in some markets. Most show up after the conversation is underway, and users usually keep chatting afterwards. It’s early, but conversational advertising is worth watching as a future channel.
What this means for Gulf brands
For brands across the Gulf, the timing is significant. Discovery moments like Ramadan, White Friday, and the Dubai Shopping Festival compress huge purchase intent into short windows. Being on the AI-generated shortlist heading into those periods, in both English and Arabic, is becoming as important as ranking on page one. And because AI visibility is category-specific and built on authority over time, it’s not something you can switch on the week a campaign launches. It’s earned in advance.
The bottom line
The 2026 Gen AI Landscape confirms what the data has signalled all year: AI has become part of how people discover brands, not a separate place they occasionally visit. Encouragingly, the fundamentals still win. Building recognisable authority, creating genuinely useful content, and keeping strong technical foundations are what make a brand discoverable, for both people and AI.
The pace of change won’t slow. But the brands that pair that reality with good data, and act on it early, will be the ones AI keeps recommending.
