AI Search vs Google in 2026: 40 Stats Every Events Business Should Know

If you’re in the events sector, you need to be visible to AI search.

An event buyer looking for a stand builder, a venue, an AV supplier or a caterer used to open Google, scan the first page, and build a shortlist. A growing share of them now open ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Perplexity or Gemini and ask for the shortlist directly. The AI names three or four suppliers. Those are the suppliers who get the enquiry.

That is the change. Google still sends the most traffic, but it no longer writes the shortlist on its own. Below are 40 sourced statistics on where AI search stands against Google in 2026, and what each one means if you sell into the events industry.

One first-party note before the numbers. When we baselined UK exhibition and events search terms across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude in Samurai Visibility, the tracked brands appeared in 0% of answers. The engines were not confused or broken. They named a small, consistent handful of other suppliers instead. Nobody in that market had been optimising for it, so a few incumbents were taking every recommendation by default.

How far has AI search already moved your buyers?

1. 37% of consumers now start their searches with AI tools instead of Google (Search Engine Land).
2. AI Overviews cut clicks through to websites by 38% on the queries where they appear (Agarwal and Sen, Indian School of Business and Carnegie Mellon).
3. 52% of adults now use AI large language models (Elon University).
4. ChatGPT has around 900 million weekly active users and roughly 5 billion monthly visits (Semrush).
5. Google AI Overviews reach approximately 2 billion monthly users.
6. The Gemini app has around 750 million monthly active users.
7. Perplexity handles roughly 780 million queries a month from 22 to 45 million monthly users.
8. Perplexity's audience skews senior: about 65% are high-income white-collar professionals and 30% hold senior leadership roles.

What this means for events businesses. Stat 2 is the cleanest evidence in this whole list, because it comes from a controlled experiment rather than a traffic estimate: researchers quietly hid AI Overviews from real searchers, clicks out to websites nearly doubled, and those searchers reported no drop in satisfaction. The clicks disappeared and nobody missed them. Stat 8 then matters more than its size, because the people signing off a stand budget, a conference venue or an annual AV contract sit inside exactly that senior professional demographic. Low overall traffic does not mean low-value traffic. Gartner had already predicted traditional search volume would fall 25% by 2026, and the behaviour behind that forecast is now visible in the numbers above.

Does AI traffic actually convert for event suppliers?

9. AI search traffic grew 527% year on year between early 2024 and mid-2025 (Semrush).
10. AI platforms generated 1.13 billion referral visits in June 2025 alone, up 357% (Similarweb, via TechCrunch).
11. AI search traffic converts at 14.2%, against 2.8% for Google organic (Exposure Ninja).
12. Visitors arriving from large language models convert at 4.4 times the rate of traditional organic search (Seer Interactive).
13. ChatGPT-referred traffic to retail sites converts at 11.4%, more than double Google organic's 5.3%.
14. Visitors from AI platforms spend 68% more time on websites than visitors from traditional organic (SE Ranking).
15. ChatGPT-referred visitors spend around 15 minutes on site against 8 minutes from Google, and view 12 pages per visit against 9.
16. AI referral traffic is still only about 1% of total web traffic (Search Engine Land), though Semrush projects AI-powered search will overtake traditional organic by 2028.

What this means for events businesses. A visitor who arrives because an AI just recommended you is pre-qualified. The AI has done the filtering an organiser would otherwise do across ten browser tabs. In practice that visitor behaves like a warm referral, not a cold search click. For a supplier working on a handful of large contracts a year, twenty of these visits can matter more than two thousand cold ones. Stat 16 is the reason to act now rather than later: the channel is small, which is exactly why it is still cheap to win.

What does zero-click search do to your show-season traffic?

17. Roughly 60% of all Google searches now end without a click to any external site, and in Google's AI Mode 93% of searches end without a click (Semrush).
18. When AI Overviews appear, organic click-through rate drops 61%, from 1.76% to 0.61% (Seer Interactive).
19. Paid click-through rate drops 68% in the same conditions, from 19.7% to 6.34% (Seer Interactive).
20. AI Overviews reduce the top organic position's click-through rate by 58% (Ahrefs).
21. AI Overviews now trigger on roughly 30% of US desktop keywords, and appear for up to 47% of all Google queries (Ahrefs).
22. Commercial and navigational AI Overviews grew from under 1% of queries in January 2025 to over 10% by November 2025.
23. Google search traffic to publishers declined globally by about a third in the year to November 2025.

What this means for events businesses. Stat 22 is the one to watch. Commercial queries are the ones that pay: "exhibition stand builder Birmingham", "conference venue for 300 people Manchester", "AV hire for a trade show". Those used to be safe from AI summaries. They are not any more, and stat 2 shows what happens to the clicks once a summary does appear. If your traffic softened outside the normal show-season dip, this is the likely cause, and ranking higher will not fix it. Being the supplier named inside the answer will.

Why does being in ChatGPT not mean being in Perplexity?

24. Only 11% of domains are cited by both ChatGPT and Perplexity (SparkToro).
25. Only about 20% overlap exists between Claude and ChatGPT search results.
26. Only 30% to 35% of URLs in Google AI Overviews also appear in Google AI Mode.
27. Citation behaviour varies wildly: Grok cites sources in 27.01% of responses, Perplexity in 13.05%, ChatGPT in 0.59%.
28. Google AI Overviews carry an average of 7.7 source links per response.
29. ChatGPT mentions brands 3.2 times more often than it links to them.
30. 80% of the URLs ChatGPT cites do not rank in Google's top 100.
31. The same brand can see citation volumes differ by 615 times between Grok and Claude (Superlines).

What this means for events businesses. There is no single AI ranking to chase. An organiser using ChatGPT and an organiser using Perplexity can receive two completely different supplier shortlists for the same brief. Stat 29 is the practical trap: ChatGPT will often recommend you by name without a link, so your analytics will show nothing at all. You can be winning in AI search and have no evidence of it. That is why mentions have to be tracked per engine, not inferred from traffic.

Is Google still worth the investment?

32. Google still processes around 8.9 billion searches a day.
33. Google added over 400 million additional daily searches year on year.
34. The businesses most exposed are those ranked roughly 100 to 10,000 in their category, which are seeing traffic declines of 10% to 55%.
35. Only 28.6% of the URLs Perplexity cites rank in Google's top 10 (Ahrefs).

What this means for events businesses. Google is still the biggest single source of enquiries for almost every UK events supplier, and abandoning it would be a mistake. But stat 34 describes most of this industry. Mid-sized stand builders, regional venues and specialist suppliers sit precisely in that band. And stat 35 kills the comfortable assumption that good Google rankings carry over automatically. They do not. The two channels need tracking side by side, which is what Samurai Visibility was built to do.

What actually earns an events supplier a citation?

36. High-traffic sites earn 3 times more AI citations than low-traffic ones (SE Ranking).
37. Listicles achieve a 25% citation rate in AI responses, against 11% for blog posts and opinion pieces (Exposure Ninja).
38. Pages updated within the last two months earn 28% more AI citations (Superlines).
39. Content containing statistics, citations and quotations achieves 30% to 40% higher visibility.
40. Brands mentioned on four or more platforms are 2.8 times more likely to appear in AI responses, and 44.2% of all citations come from the first 30% of a page's text.

What this means for events businesses. These five stats describe a different job from classic SEO. Stat 37 explains why third-party roundups matter so much: "best exhibition stand builders in the UK" listicles get cited far more than anything you publish on your own site, so getting onto them is a placement task, not a writing task. Stat 38 rewards keeping show pages, venue pages and case studies current instead of leaving last year's exhibition calendar live. Stat 40 says put the answer at the top of the page, and get named in more than one place: your own site alone is not enough.

Where is the AI search market heading?

McKinsey projects that $750 billion in US consumer spending will flow through AI-powered search by 2028. The market for AI visibility tools was around $848 million in 2025, with projections toward $33.7 billion by 2034. Yet only about 16% of brands currently track their AI search visibility systematically, while 54% of US marketers say they plan to start optimising for AI search within the next three to six months, and 25.7% plan to create content specifically for AI citations in 2026 (Exposure Ninja). Businesses that have already started report visibility improvements of 30% to 40% within 60 to 90 days.

The gap between the 16% who measure and the 54% who intend to start is the window. In the UK events sector it is wider still, because most suppliers in this market have not begun.

What should an events business do about it this quarter?

1. Check whether AI engines can read your site at all. Blocked AI crawlers are common and silent. An AI SEO audit covers crawler access, structured data, content structure and metadata.
2. Baseline your visibility on the terms your buyers actually type. Not brand terms. Terms like "custom exhibition stand builder near the NEC" or "corporate event caterer Birmingham". Track each engine separately, because stats 24 to 31 say they disagree with each other.
3. Go after the roundups. Find the listicles and directories AI engines already cite for your category, then get onto them. Stat 37 makes this the highest-return action available.
4. Refresh what you already have. Update show pages, venue capacities, case studies and pricing guidance. Stat 38 pays you for it.
5. Ask every enquiry where they found you. AI engines send no referrer data. First-party attribution is the only way to prove the channel, and proof is what turns it into a budget line.