AI Mode launched in the US at I/O in May 2025. A year later Sundar Pichai told the I/O 2026 audience it had passed 1 billion monthly active users, which makes it one of the fastest-adopted products Google has shipped. For brands, that makes AI Mode a primary search surface in its own right, not an experiment beside the main results.
The Official Numbers
| Metric | Figure | Source and date |
|---|---|---|
| AI Mode monthly active users | 1 billion+ | I/O keynote, May 19, 2026; repeated on the Q2 call, July 22, 2026 |
| AI Mode daily active users | 75 million+ | Q3 2025 earnings, the most recent daily figure Google has given |
| AI Overviews monthly active users | 2.5 billion+ | I/O keynote, May 19, 2026 |
| Gemini app monthly active users | 950 million, daily users tripled year on year | Q2 2026 call |
| Tokens processed across Google surfaces | 3.2 quadrillion+ per month, up 7x in a year | I/O keynote |
| Search and Other revenue growth | +17% year on year | Q2 2026 call |
Google tied the 1 billion figure to the global rollout: "since expanding AI Mode globally last October." On the Q2 call it also said AI Mode responses now cost less to serve than at any point since launch, so Google can afford to show AI Mode on more queries.
How People Search in AI Mode
The best behavioural data is still Semrush's study of about 69 million US desktop sessions from May to July 2025, when AI Mode was new. Its findings describe a different kind of search:
| Behaviour | AI Mode | Classic Google search |
|---|---|---|
| Average query length | 7.22 words | 4.0 words |
| Queries per session | 2-3 | ~5 |
| Zero-click sessions | 92-94% | ~34% without an AI Overview, ~43% with one |
| Sessions with a click to an external site | 6-8% | Majority |
Longer queries and fewer follow-up searches mean users are asking complete questions and getting complete answers. The 2025 data comes from a much smaller AI Mode audience, so treat the exact percentages as directional. The pattern is what matters.
What Changed in 2026
At I/O 2026 Google moved AI Mode to Gemini 3.5 Flash by default and added search agents that watch topics in the background (see the AI Mode default model change and search agents). Google Marketing Live added ad formats built for AI Mode, covered in AI Mode ad formats. Together these turn AI Mode from a place to ask one question into a place people return to.
Brand Visibility Implications
With 92-94% of AI Mode sessions ending without a click, the answer is the result. A brand named in the answer is part of the decision. A brand linked below it mostly is not. AI Mode also runs many sub-searches behind each question, so it pulls from a wider set of pages than one results page would, which helps specialist brands with deep, specific content and hurts brands relying on a single ranking page. Measure AI Mode separately from AI Overviews, because they answer different queries and cite different sources. See Google AI visibility and AI Overviews CTR impact.
Methodology
Figures come from published first-party and panel studies, each cited at the point of use: Google's I/O 2026 keynote and Q2 2026 earnings remarks, Previsible's AI Traffic Report, SE Ranking's Claude traffic research, Goodie's AI Search Traffic Report, Seer Interactive, Ahrefs, Pew Research Center, and Semrush. We report each study's own date range next to its numbers because these studies measure different panels over different windows. Where they disagree, we show the disagreement rather than averaging it away. Figures are as of September 2026 and are reviewed quarterly.
How Presenc AI Helps
Presenc AI runs your priority prompts through Google AI Mode and records whether your brand is named, how it is described, and which sources the answer draws on, next to your results in AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity.