26.4 million people in the UK used an AI tool in April 2026. That is measured audience data, not a forecast, and it is up 2.4 million in three months. Yet most UK businesses still plan their marketing as though Google’s ten blue links are the only route to a customer.
This page pulls together the AI search statistics that actually matter to a UK business owner. Every figure is sourced, dated and linked. Where UK data does not exist, the source is labelled clearly so you are not quoting American retail numbers at a British board meeting.
Updated quarterly. Last updated August 2026.
Key takeaways
- Just over half of UK adults (54%) now use AI tools, up from 31% a year earlier.
- Around 30% of UK Google searches return an AI Overview, and 75% of online adults read those summaries at least sometimes.
- Adoption is real but shallow in places: only 4% of UK adults use an AI chatbot for news weekly, the lowest figure of 48 markets surveyed.
- Being cited inside an AI Overview delivers roughly 120% more organic clicks per impression than not being cited on the same results page.
- UK AI shopping adoption more than doubled in a year, from 12% to nearly 28% of shoppers.
- Business readiness lags badly: around 35% of UK businesses with 10 or more employees use AI at all, and only 10% of those use it extensively.
How many UK adults use AI search in 2026?
Just over half of UK adults (54%) say they use AI tools such as ChatGPT, Copilot or Gemini, up from 31% the year before. Separately, 26.4 million people in the UK used an AI website or app in April 2026. AI search is no longer a minority behaviour, it is a mainstream one.
The adoption numbers, in order of usefulness:
- 54% of UK adults use AI tools such as ChatGPT, Copilot or Gemini, against 31% in 2024 (Ofcom, Adults’ Media Use and Attitudes, April 2026).
- 26.4 million people in the UK used AI tools in April 2026, up 2.4 million in three months (UKOM Ipsos iris, via IAB UK).
- That figure was 20.2 million in July 2025 and 24 million in January 2026, so the curve is still climbing (UKOM Ipsos iris, via IAB UK).
- ChatGPT reached a 16 million monthly UK audience in September 2025, comfortably the most used AI tool in the country (UKOM Ipsos iris, via IAB UK).
- ChatGPT’s share of total UK time spent on AI tools fell from 84% to 76% between October 2025 and January 2026, so the market is fragmenting (UKOM Ipsos iris, via IAB UK).
- ChatGPT recorded 1.8 billion UK visits in the first eight months of 2025, against 368 million in the same period of 2024 (Ofcom, Online Nation 2025).
- In August 2025 alone, ChatGPT took 252 million UK visits, up 156% year on year. Gemini grew 146%, Claude 138% and Perplexity 100% over the same year, from much smaller bases (Ofcom, Online Nation 2025).
- Around 30% of Google searches now show an AI Overview, and 53% of UK adults say they see these summaries often (Ofcom, Online Nation 2025).
- 75% of online UK adults read AI-generated search summaries at least sometimes, including many who never open a chatbot (Ofcom, April 2026).
- Globally, ChatGPT passed 900 million weekly active users in February 2026 (TechCrunch, reporting OpenAI).
- Google states AI Overviews now reach more than 2.5 billion monthly users and AI Mode more than 1 billion (9to5Google, June 2026).
The last two matter for a simple reason. Google Search is still used by 82% of UK adults and handles roughly 3 billion UK searches a month (Ofcom, Online Nation 2025). AI has not replaced search. It has been inserted on top of it.
Which UK age groups use AI search, and which do not?
Use skews young and working age. Roughly four in five 16 to 24 year olds (79%) and three quarters of 25 to 34 year olds (74%) use AI tools, while adoption among the over 65s is a fraction of that. If your customers are older, the national average will overstate your exposure.
- 79% of 16 to 24 year olds and 74% of 25 to 34 year olds use AI tools (Ofcom, April 2026).
- 62% of 16 to 24s and 60% of 25 to 34s read AI search summaries, against 54% of adults who do not use chatbots at all (Ofcom, April 2026).
- 67% of 15 to 24s used an AI tool in September 2025, and almost a quarter used one every single day (UKOM Ipsos iris, via IAB UK).
- The fastest growth is now in the 35 to 54 bracket, up 49% over six months, while 15 to 34s grew a more modest 26% (UKOM Ipsos iris, via IAB UK).
- 44% of UK time spent on AI tools falls inside working hours, 9am to 5.29pm (UKOM Ipsos iris, via IAB UK). B2B buyers are researching you on the clock.
- Only 4% of UK adults use an AI chatbot for news weekly, the lowest of 48 markets surveyed, against 10% globally (Reuters Institute, Digital News Report 2026).
- Globally, 17% of 18 to 24 year olds use AI chatbots for news weekly, against 5% of over 55s (Reuters Institute, 2026).
- Trust remains the brake: global trust in news from AI chatbots sits at 20%, and 57% of UK adults say they would trust an AI-written news story less than a human-written one (Reuters Institute 2026; Ofcom, April 2026).
The pattern is consistent. British consumers are happy to use AI to summarise, compare and shortlist. They are far more cautious about treating it as a source of truth.
Does AI search influence what UK consumers buy?
Yes, and the shift happened quickly. UK AI shopping adoption more than doubled in a year, from 12% to nearly 28% of shoppers, and 44% of UK shoppers say they would let AI handle a purchase end to end once they had set their criteria.
- UK AI shopping adoption rose from 12% to nearly 28% in twelve months (Adyen, 2026 Retail Report, January 2026).
- 43% of Gen Z and 42% of Millennials in the UK now use AI when shopping (Adyen, 2026).
- 44% of UK shoppers are open to AI running the whole process including the purchase, and 53% of those already using AI assistants say it saves them time (Adyen, 2026).
- 64% of UK online shoppers say they want agentic shopping tools, with trust and security named as the blockers (Commerce and PayPal, Logica Research, June 2026).
- In US retail, AI-referred traffic converted 42% better than non-AI traffic in March 2026, a reversal from converting 38% worse a year earlier (Adobe Analytics, April 2026).
- Those same AI-referred visitors generated 37% more revenue per visit and spent 48% longer on product pages (Adobe Analytics, 2026). US data, but the direction of travel is hard to ignore.
The commercial read is straightforward. AI referrals are still a small slice of total traffic, but they arrive pre-qualified. The chatbot has already done the comparison work, so the click that reaches you is closer to a decision than a click from a broad Google query.
What has AI search done to clicks and traffic?
It has compressed them, unevenly. AI Overviews appear on roughly 36% of informational queries but only 5% of transactional ones, so exposure depends entirely on the kind of search your customers run. Citation, not mere presence, decides whether you still get the click.
The clearest published click maths comes from Seer Interactive’s April 2026 study of 53 brands, 5.47 million queries and 2.43 billion organic impressions.
| Scenario (informational queries) | Organic clicks per 1 million impressions |
|---|---|
| No AI Overview shown | ~33,500 |
| AI Overview shown, your brand cited | ~20,743 |
| AI Overview shown, your brand not cited | ~9,445 |
Source: Seer Interactive, AIO Impact on Google CTR, April 2026.
- Being cited in an AI Overview delivers around 120% more organic clicks per impression than not being cited, though it still trails a no-Overview result by 38% (Seer Interactive, 2026).
- AI Overview prevalence by intent: 36% of informational queries, 8% commercial, 5% transactional (Seer Interactive, 2026).
- By query format, comparison queries trigger an Overview 95.4% of the time, question queries 85.9%, price or cost queries 83.4% and best-of queries 81.3% (Seer Interactive, 2026).
- “Near me” informational queries showed an Overview 76.9% of the time, which undercuts the assumption that local search is insulated (Seer Interactive, 2026).
- The decline is not infinite. Organic click-through rate on Overview queries recovered from 1.31% in December 2025 to 2.36% in February 2026 (Seer Interactive, 2026).
Two practical conclusions. First, if your content strategy leans on comparison and question-format pages, assume an AI Overview will sit above it. Second, the goal has moved from ranking to being the source the answer quotes. That is the whole argument for generative engine optimisation, and it is why ranking inside Google AI Overviews is now a distinct discipline from classic SEO.
How ready are UK businesses for AI search?
Not very. Around 35% of UK businesses with 10 or more employees use AI at all, and only 10% of those adopters use it extensively. Consumer adoption has run well ahead of business adoption, which is exactly the gap a smaller, faster company can exploit.
- AI use among UK businesses with 10 or more employees rose from about 12% to about 35% between late 2023 and June 2026 (ONS, Artificial intelligence in UK businesses, July 2026).
- Among those adopters, only 10% report using AI extensively (ONS, 2026).
- The sector spread is stark: 58% in information and communication against 13% in construction (ONS, 2026).
- Large language models are the most adopted technology at 18% of businesses, ahead of visual content creation at 16% (ONS, 2026).
- Across all UK businesses of every size, 29% reported using AI in June 2026, rising to 49% among those with 250 or more employees (ONS, Business Insights and Conditions Survey).
- Among businesses that handle digitised data, 41% use AI for at least one purpose (DSIT, UK Business Data Survey 2026).
- Google began rolling out AI search opt-out controls and AI performance data in Search Console to UK site owners first, in June 2026, ahead of a global release (9to5Google, June 2026).
That last point is worth acting on. UK businesses are getting visibility reporting for AI surfaces before most of the world. Very few are looking at it.
What these AI search statistics mean for a UK SME
Strip out the noise and five things follow.
Your buyers are already using AI, even if they never mention it. With 54% adoption nationally and 44% of AI time falling inside the working day, the shortlist you are competing on may have been drawn up by a chatbot before anyone visited your website.
Volume is not the metric any more. A fall in organic sessions can sit alongside flat or rising enquiries, because AI referrals convert better. Track enquiries, branded search and citations rather than raw traffic, or you will kill a channel that is working.
Citation beats ranking. On an Overview-heavy query, being quoted is worth roughly twice as many clicks as being ignored. Structure your pages so a machine can lift a clean, complete answer from them.
Your risk is intent-shaped. Informational content is heavily exposed at 36%. Transactional pages sit at 5%. Audit which side of that line your revenue actually comes from before rewriting anything.
The competitive window is open now. Consumers are at 54% adoption. Businesses are at 35%, and mostly shallow. That gap will close.
Cite this page
Please credit Lobo Digital and link to this page if you use these figures. Suggested citation: Lobo Digital, “AI Search Statistics 2026: How UK Consumers Really Use ChatGPT and AI Overviews”, lobodigital.co.uk. All underlying sources are linked inline so you can verify each figure directly.
Find out where you actually stand
Numbers are only useful if you know your own position in them. We will look at whether AI assistants can find you, whether they recommend you, and what that is costing you in enquiries.
If you would rather start by tracking your own AI visibility, the Lobo Digital App does the monitoring in the background.
