The November 2026 AI statistics report: 168 sourced figures

This is our monthly report of the cross-platform AI figures: how many people use AI worldwide and by country, how many users each platform has, market share measured three ways, business adoption, revenue and spending, agents, and AI next to search. Every figure is printed as its source states it, with the source, the date and the sample or method beside it. Figures we could not trace to a source we could open are named in the method section and left out of the tables. Company statements, measurement-firm estimates and figures the press reported from unnamed people are kept apart, and each table row says which one it is.

• Meta's capital expenditures were $34.91 billion in Q3 2026 (Meta Q3 2026 results press release).
• OpenAI put ChatGPT at "our collective 1.2B weekly users" (OpenAI, DevDay 2026 Recap, 29 September 2026).
• 55.9% of US businesses on Ramp paid for AI in September 2026 (Ramp AI Index).
• ChatGPT took 56.4%, Gemini 25.0% and Claude 9.6% of generative AI website traffic in September 2026 (Similarweb).
• ChatGPT sent 80.47% of the AI chatbot referrals to websites that Statcounter recorded in September 2026 (Statcounter Global Stats).
• 21% of UK adults used an AI app or service for news in the past month, with ChatGPT the most used at 13% (Ofcom, 15 September 2026).
• AI training made up 52% of crawler requests by June 2026, by the crawlers' stated purpose, up from 22% in spring 2025 (Cloudflare).
• 18.8% of the working-age population worldwide used generative AI in June 2026 (Microsoft AI Economy Institute).
• 40% of respondents at organisations with more than $1 billion in revenue report scaling AI agents, up from 27% a year earlier (McKinsey, The State of AI, survey 4 May to 8 June 2026).
• AI Overviews has over 2.5 billion monthly active users (Google, Sundar Pichai's I/O keynote, 19 May 2026).

We publish a full report for each platform: ChatGPT statistics: users, share and revenue, Google Gemini statistics, Claude AI statistics from Anthropic, Perplexity AI statistics, Grok AI statistics from SpaceXAI and Meta Muse statistics. Each one goes deeper on that platform's users, share and money figures.

How many people use AI

Microsoft puts generative AI use at 18.8% of the working-age population worldwide, Pew Research Center finds about half of US adults ever use AI chatbots, and Ofcom finds 54% of UK adults use AI tools. Each counts something different: Microsoft's figure comes from its own telemetry, Pew asked whether adults ever use chatbots, and Ofcom asked people whether they use AI tools.

Worldwide and by country

Worldwide, 18.8% of working-age people used a generative AI product in June 2026, with the Global North at 28.8% against 16.2% in the Global South. Of the seven economies we picked from Microsoft's dataset, the United Arab Emirates leads at 73.3% and the United Kingdom sits at 43.7%. Microsoft's measure is built from its own telemetry of people aged 15 to 64 who used a generative AI product, so it counts recorded use rather than survey answers. Microsoft says its next report will widen the measure to cover newer tools, and it expects that change to lift the figures for almost all economies.

The table below gives Microsoft's figures for seven economies across four periods.

The US and the UK

In the US, 49% of adults say they ever use AI chatbots, against 33% in 2024, though the 2024 question was worded differently and asked only of people who had heard of chatbots. About a quarter of Americans use chatbots daily, and use falls with age: 66% of 18 to 29 year olds against 23% of over-65s. Pew surveyed 5,119 US adults in February 2026. In the UK, 54% of adults say they use AI tools, against 31% the year before, and Ofcom itself says "year-on-year comparisons should be treated with caution." Use is highest among younger adults, at 79% of 16 to 24 year olds, and 75% of online UK adults read AI-generated search summaries at least sometimes. Ofcom's survey covered 7,533 UK adults aged 16 and over.

AI for news

One in ten people use AI chatbots for news each week, up from 7% a year earlier, in the Reuters Institute's Digital News Report. The UK is the lowest of any market in that survey at 4%, and 16% of under-35s use chatbots for news. Only 1% say AI is their main source of news. In the Reuters Institute's news survey, 4% of respondents always or often click through from AI to news sources, against 19% from search. Across 45 markets, 42% of people who use chatbots for news ask follow-up questions.

The table below lists each usage figure with its source, its sample or method, and the day we checked it.

How many users each AI platform has

OpenAI, Alphabet and Sensor Tower count in different units, so the table prints each unit. OpenAI counts 1.2 billion weekly users for ChatGPT; Alphabet says the Gemini app has reached "one billion users" without stating a period; Sensor Tower, a measurement firm, counts monthly users and puts ChatGPT over 1.1 billion, Gemini at 662 million and Claude at 245 million.

The table below gives the user figures for each platform, each with its unit.

OpenAI's own counts of ChatGPT weekly users over the year sit below.

ChatGPT is at 1.2 billion weekly users, up from 1 billion in July, with more than 50 million consumer subscribers as of 27 February 2026; 44% of US adults say they use it. OpenAI says its products reach more than one billion weekly active users across all products, not ChatGPT alone. More in ChatGPT statistics: users, share and revenue.

Gemini: Alphabet says the Gemini app has reached "one billion users"; on 22 July 2026 Google gave 950 million monthly active users, and 24% of US adults say they ever use Gemini. More in Google Gemini statistics.

Claude: Sensor Tower counts 245 million monthly users for Claude. Anthropic gives no consumer figure; its filing lists more than 11,900 customers with $100,000 or more of revenue on a TTM basis, and its Series G post of 12 February 2026 said weekly active Claude Code users had doubled since 1 January, with run-rate revenue over $2.5 billion. 6% of US adults say they ever use Claude. More in Claude AI statistics from Anthropic.

Perplexity: Similarweb's numbers put the Perplexity app at 37.9 million monthly active users in February 2026, up from 26.2 million in August 2025; the CEO said Perplexity received 780 million queries in May 2025. More in Perplexity AI statistics.

Grok: SpaceX's prospectus states that approximately 117 million monthly active users used Grok's AI features at 31 March 2026, up from 89 million at 31 December 2025, and counts 6.3 million active paid subscribers across X Premium and SuperGrok at 31 March 2026, of which 1.9 million SuperGrok; Grok Bot had 800,000 paid weekly users in early October 2026, and 8% of US adults say they ever use Grok. More in Grok AI statistics from SpaceXAI.

Meta: on Meta's Q3 2026 earnings call, Mark Zuckerberg, Founder and CEO, Meta, said: "In just a month and a half, more than 10 million people in the US and Canada have set up Muse personal agents." About 25% of them use it on any given day. More in Meta Muse statistics.

Copilot: Microsoft gives growth rates only for Copilot, telling its FY27 Q1 earnings call on 28 October 2026 that daily users are up nearly 50% on the quarter and over 5x on the year; in Pew Research Center's February 2026 survey, 17% of US adults say they ever use it.

AI market share, measured three ways

Similarweb, Statcounter and Sensor Tower measure different things, so answers differ. Similarweb's share of generative AI website traffic puts ChatGPT at 56.4% and Gemini at 25.0%; Statcounter's share of AI chatbot referrals to websites puts ChatGPT at 80.47% and Gemini at 10.94%; Sensor Tower's AI assistant market share, as TechCrunch reports it, put ChatGPT at 46.4% at the end of May.

Website traffic (Similarweb)

ChatGPT's share of generative AI website traffic went from 71.8% in October 2025 to 56.4% in September 2026, while Gemini went from 13.6% to 25.0%. Similarweb counts website traffic only, as its title says. The table below gives the monthly series.

Referrals to websites (Statcounter)

ChatGPT sent 80.47% of the AI chatbot referrals to websites that Statcounter recorded in September 2026, with Gemini at 10.94% and Perplexity at 5.84%. Gemini passed Perplexity to become the second-largest source of AI chatbot referrals in the March 2026 data. Statcounter states that Grok sends no referral data in its header, so Grok has no cell in this series. The table below gives four months from the series.

App and web audience (Sensor Tower)

Sensor Tower says ChatGPT's True Audience share, unique users across app and web, fell below 50% for the first time in March 2026; TechCrunch reports its market share at 46.4% by the end of May, Gemini 27.7%, Claude 10.3%. The table below gives the Sensor Tower figures.

Crawls against referrals (Cloudflare)

Cloudflare's crawl-to-refer ratio counts how many pages a platform crawls for each visit it refers to a website. Anthropic crawled 38,000 pages for every referred visit in July 2025, even after an 87% decline that year. These are 2025 figures, the newest table Cloudflare published in the pages we read. Cloudflare's 2025 figures show the imbalance on the crawl side: Google referred nearly 90% of search referrals to Cloudflare-protected sites in 2025, while Anthropic's crawl-to-refer ratio reached as much as 500,000:1, OpenAI's reached 3,700:1 in March, and Google's rose from just over 3:1 to as high as 30:1; around its Content Independence Day in 2025, Cloudflare noted ratios from 118:1 up to nearly 50,000:1 across leading AI bots. The table below gives the January and July 2025 ratios.

How many businesses use AI

Ramp's card data shows 55.9% of US businesses on Ramp paying for AI; the Census Bureau's survey puts US firms using AI between 17% and 20%; nearly nine in ten respondents in McKinsey's global survey report regular AI use in at least one business function. The three ask different questions: Ramp counts card transactions, the Census Bureau asks whether a firm used AI in the past two weeks, and McKinsey's figures are self-reported by respondents.

Card data (Ramp)

Paid adoption on Ramp reached 55.9% in September, 12.1 points above a year earlier. Anthropic is paid by 43.8% of Ramp businesses and OpenAI by 40.6%, and Anthropic took 60.5% of Ramp token spend in the week ending 23 October. Ramp itself says its results likely underestimate adoption, because free AI tools leave no transaction. Ara Kharazian, Lead Economist, Ramp, wrote in Ramp Economics Lab: "It feels like we're at the top of the S-curve, where the growth in the market will have to come from more intense adoption rather than more customers."

Survey data (Census Bureau and McKinsey)

The Census Bureau's business survey puts US firms using AI between 17% and 20% from December 2025 to May 2026, rising to 37% of firms with at least 250 employees; a Census working paper puts 18% of firms using AI in a business function, or 32% weighted by employment. In McKinsey's survey of 1,719 participants in 97 nations, 44% of respondents say AI is scaling across their enterprise, up from 38% a year earlier, and 37% attribute at least some EBIT impact to AI.

Spending forecast and order books

Gartner forecasts worldwide AI spending of $2.7 trillion in 2026, up 49.5%; its table total reads 2,670,460 million dollars. Most of it is infrastructure at 1,484,397 million dollars, with AI agents and assistants at 29,219 million dollars. Gartner places generative AI in what it calls the Trough of Disillusionment for 2026. Microsoft's commercial remaining performance obligation rose 73% to $677 billion.

The table below gives the business adoption and spending figures in full.

The money: revenue, valuations and spending on compute

The firmest figures are the filed ones: Anthropic's S-1 puts consumption revenue at $13.1 billion, 80% of the total, in the six months to 30 June. OpenAI's September annualised revenue of almost $50 billion is a figure Reuters reported from one anonymous source. Capital expenditure is company-stated in results releases and calls: Alphabet at $51.4 billion in the third quarter, Meta at $34.91 billion and Microsoft at $45.2 billion.

AI company revenue: filed, stated and reported

Anthropic's S-1 defines run-rate revenue as consumption fees over a trailing 28-day period multiplied by 13, plus monthly subscription fees multiplied by 12. OpenAI's reported figure leaves out sales through cloud partners such as AWS and Google Cloud, where Anthropic's includes them, so the two run-rates are not like for like. Anthropic has filed a registration statement on Form S-1 and says it intends to list its Class A common stock on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the symbol ANT. SpaceX says its Super Intelligence revenue growth came mainly from new cloud services agreements, the Cursor acquisition and wider Grok adoption.

The table below gives the revenue, valuation and capex figures, each marked as filed, stated, guidance or reported.

Anthropic's revenue, as reported by Reuters from investor events rather than from filings, sits below.

Perplexity's annualised revenue, part company-stated and part reported, sits below.

Cloud revenue and capital expenditure

Alphabet's Q3 2026 earnings release, filed 28 October 2026, says Google Cloud revenue rose 103% to $30.7 billion in the third quarter; the earnings call the same day put Google Cloud's backlog at $561 billion. Capital expenditure guidance for the year now reads $195-205 billion at Alphabet (reported 28 October 2026), $135-145 billion at Meta (21 October 2026) and about $170 billion for the calendar year at Microsoft (28 October 2026). Gartner's spending forecast says: "The buildout of AI data center capacity is the largest infrastructure project humanity has even undertaken." (The word "even" is Gartner's own, as printed.)

AI agents

In McKinsey's survey, agents are scaling at large firms and flat at small ones: 40% of respondents at organisations with more than $1 billion in revenue report scaling AI agents, up from 27% a year earlier, while smaller organisations stay at 22%. About two in ten respondents are scaling software coding agents, rising to 31% at larger enterprises. The usage figures vendors give for their own agents, Muse and Grok Bot, sit in the platform section above.

The vendors' own sentences about agents carry few user numbers. OpenAI launched Dots, which it calls always-on agents, at DevDay, and says developers can run Codex on a computer, from a phone or in the cloud. Anthropic's S-1 calls Claude Code its coding agent and the clearest example of what it calls Virtual Collaborators. Meta says it expects to grow Muse to serve billions of people, which is a goal, not a user count. SpaceX says it introduced Grok Bot, its always-on agentic system, in the quarter. On Microsoft's FY27 Q1 earnings call, Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft, said: "We think of Copilot as the new OS for work."

The table below gives the agent figures.

AI next to search

Google reports AI Overviews at over 2.5 billion monthly active users and AI Mode at over 1 billion, while Statcounter records search at 91.01% of referrals to websites and AI chatbots at 0.4%. The two measure different things: Statcounter counts referrals, not searches.

How big AI answers are next to Google Search

Google says its year-over-year query growth rate is the highest in five years, that AI Mode queries average three times longer than traditional searches with one in five using voice, images or documents, and that it has crossed 50 billion visual searches a month. Statcounter still records Google at 89.94% of search referrals worldwide. In the UK, Ofcom finds Google Search is used by 82% of adults, with 3 billion searches a month, and that ChatGPT had 1.8 billion UK visits in the first eight months of 2025, up from 368 million in the same period of 2024. For the mechanics behind those referrals, see how a search engine crawls, indexes and ranks pages. The table below gives Statcounter's search referral shares.

What AI assistants send back

Similarweb counts an average of 770.7 million AI referral visits a month worldwide between June 2025 and May 2026, more than double the year before, yet still a low single-digit percentage of most sites' total traffic. In a different window, Similarweb also shows AI referrals flat from January 2025 to January 2026 while visits to AI platforms kept climbing. Homepage referrals from ChatGPT rose from roughly 26-29% of referral traffic before a May update to about 62-63% by late May 2026, a level that has held in Similarweb's weekly referral data. In the UK, Statcounter recorded ChatGPT at 79.8% of AI chatbot referrals in September 2026, with Gemini at 10.21%.

AI Overviews and clicks

In Pew's panel, users who saw an AI summary clicked a traditional result in 8% of visits, against 15% without one; a link inside the summary itself was clicked in 1% of visits, and sessions ended on 26% of pages with a summary against 16% without. In Pew's March 2025 data, 18% of searches produced a summary. A randomised field experiment, published as a working paper, found that, where they appear, AI Overviews cut outbound organic clicks by 39.8% and raised zero-click searches by 34.5%. Seer Interactive's tracking shows organic CTR on queries with an AI Overview falling to a floor of 1.3% in December 2025 and rising to 2.4% by February 2026, while CTR on queries without a summary rose from 2.8% to 3.8%; Seer calls its own data directional. For the click baseline, see organic SEO explained.

What AI answers cite

Most Google AI summaries cite sources: 88% cited three or more, and only 1% cited one. Wikipedia, YouTube and Reddit are the most frequently cited sources in both AI summaries and standard results, and 6% of sources linked in AI overviews were .gov sites, against 2% in standard results. Vercite, an AI visibility vendor, found five major engines agree on only 9% of their most-cited domains. Similarweb shows citations appearing in about 6.8% of US ChatGPT prompts by May 2026, up from about 1.6% in June 2025, and that cited pages are often not the pages that get the visit: 58.8% of referral visits landed on homepages. Limor Barenholtz, Director of SEO & AI Search at Similarweb, wrote on the Similarweb blog: "Visibility and website traffic have decoupled, which is the practical face of zero-click marketing applied to a buying journey rather than a keyword." In an industry survey updated on 28 September 2026, 81.9% of 116 SEO professionals said they believe backlinks influence whether AI engines cite their brand; that is a survey of belief, not a measurement of citations. We cover the mechanics in generative engine optimization for link building and off-page SEO.

Crawlers and blocking

Cloudflare's Radar data shows Googlebot caused over 28% of Verified Bot traffic in 2025, with OpenAI's GPTBot next at about 7.5%; search crawlers made up 40% of Verified Bot traffic and AI crawlers half as much at 20%. Crawling for model training reached as much as 7 to 8 times search crawling at peak, and AI training rose from 22% of crawler requests in spring 2025 to 52% by June 2026, by the crawlers' stated purpose. Cloudflare also reports that the user agents most often fully disallowed in robots.txt are AI crawlers, including GPTBot, ClaudeBot and CCBot, and that Googlebot alone accounted for 4.5% of HTML request traffic against 4.2% for all other AI bots.

What people say they do

About four in ten US adults say they use chatbots for information searching, and six in ten say they read AI search summaries, in Pew's survey. In the UK, Ofcom finds 21% of adults used an AI app or service for news in the past month, with ChatGPT the most used at 13%.

The table below gives the AI-versus-search figures in full.

FAQ

How many people use AI?

Microsoft's telemetry measure puts 18.8% of the working-age population worldwide using generative AI in June 2026. Survey measures differ: 49% of US adults say they ever use AI chatbots (Pew Research Center, February 2026), and 54% of UK adults say they use AI tools (Ofcom, 2026).

How many people use ChatGPT?

OpenAI's own count is 1.2 billion weekly users, given at its DevDay event on 29 September 2026. Sensor Tower, a measurement firm, counts over 1.1 billion monthly users. The Sensor Tower count is for the end of May 2026.

Which AI chatbot has the most users?

ChatGPT, on every measure we print. Sensor Tower's monthly user count at the end of May 2026 puts ChatGPT over 1.1 billion, ahead of Gemini at 662 million and Claude at 245 million.

What share of businesses use AI?

Ramp's card and bill-pay data shows 55.9% of US businesses on Ramp paying for AI in September 2026. The Census Bureau's survey, which asks about use in the past two weeks, put US firms between 17% and 20% from December 2025 to May 2026.

How much will the world spend on AI?

Gartner's forecast, published 16 September 2026, puts worldwide AI spending at $2.7 trillion in 2026, up 49.5% on the year before. That is a forecast, and most of it is infrastructure.

How much revenue does OpenAI make?

Reuters reported on 8 October 2026 that OpenAI told investors its annualised revenue for September was almost $50 billion. The figure comes from one anonymous source and leaves out sales through cloud partners.

How we check these figures

We trace each figure to the company's post, filing or call, the survey or measurement firm, or the news report that carries it, and copy its sentence. We keep a company's own statement, a measurement firm's estimate and a figure the press reported from unnamed people apart, and each row says which it is. We left out figures we could not open at their source: a company figure for Perplexity monthly users, paid AI subscription shares of US households, and Codex weekly users. We republish this report every month with the month in the title.

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