The AI answer is becoming the first page

For twenty years, being found meant appearing in a list of blue links and hoping for the click. AI summaries change the shape of that moment. The person often reads a written answer first, and the list of links becomes supporting material.

Three things that change

1. The unit of visibility is the answer

You are no longer only competing for a position. You are competing to be named, described accurately and cited inside a paragraph.

2. Sources matter as much as pages

Answers lean on a small set of cited pages, often independent reviews, documentation and comparison content. Being visible can depend on pages you do not own.

3. The audience is spread across platforms

People use several assistants and AI features inside search. Their behaviour differs, so one platform's result cannot stand in for the others.

Those figures are Similarweb estimates of worldwide website traffic, which leave out mobile apps and system level entry points. They show a direction, not a complete picture, and the gap between the leaders has narrowed over the past year.

What the evidence says about behaviour

The claim that AI answers are becoming a first stop needs care, because it is easy to overstate. The clearest independent evidence on search behaviour comes from Pew Research Center, which analysed the browsing data of 900 U.S. adults during March 2025 and compared visits to Google results pages that showed an AI summary with visits that did not.

These figures come from Pew Research Center's analysis of the browsing data of 900 U.S. adults during March 2025. They describe Google searches in one country and one month, and they measure clicks, not influence. A person who reads a brand name in an AI summary and searches for it later will not appear in these numbers at all.

Two readings are reasonable. One is that AI summaries answer some questions well enough that people do not click. The other is that a summary can still send attention to a brand through its name, even when it sends fewer clicks. Both point to the same practical conclusion: visibility inside the answer has value that a click count will not show.

How widely AI answers are seen

Google's chief executive stated on the company's second quarter 2025 earnings call that AI Overviews had two billion monthly users and that AI Mode had more than one hundred million monthly active users in the United States and India. These are company statements about reach, not measurements of how much any brand is affected, but they show that AI-written answers now sit in front of very large audiences inside a product people already use.

Assistants as a separate place people go

Beyond search, people also go to assistants directly. The Reuters Institute's 2025 Digital News Report surveyed respondents across 48 markets and found that seven percent use AI chatbots to get news each week, rising to fifteen percent among under-25s.

The Reuters Institute reports that these numbers are small overall but much higher among younger audiences, and that ChatGPT is the most used tool. Averaged across markets, 4% said they had accessed ChatGPT for news in the last week. The India figure is worth noting for any brand selling there: it is well above the global average.

News is a narrow use case, and the figures are not a measure of shopping behaviour. They are useful as a signal of habit. The younger the audience, the more natural it is to ask an assistant first.

A forecast worth knowing, and worth handling with care

What this means for a brand team

• Add a second layer of measurement. Keep tracking rankings and clicks, and add mention, recommendation and citation rates from a fixed prompt set.
• Assume the person reading an AI answer has not visited your site yet. The answer is doing part of the job your homepage used to do, so your key facts must be stated clearly where systems can read them.
• Measure by platform. The traffic picture below shows how quickly the mix is moving, and a result on one assistant says little about another.
• Treat citations as a target, not an afterthought. When sources are shown, they decide which brands are visible.

Similarweb's figures cover website visits only. They leave out mobile apps and system-level entry points, so they understate assistants that live inside other products. They are best read as a direction of travel rather than a census.