AI Marketing Statistics 2026

These are the 2026 AI marketing statistics worth citing: adoption, budgets, AI search and zero-click, AI referral traffic, B2B buyer behavior and affiliate marketing. Each figure has a date and a link to its source.

How many marketers use AI in 2026?

AI is used in 24.2% of marketing activities in 2026, up from 13.1% in 2024 and 17.2% in 2025 (The CMO Survey, 308 US marketing leaders, 2026).

• Marketing leaders expect AI to reach 55.9% of activities within three years (The CMO Survey, 2026).
• Tech and software companies use AI in 36.1% of marketing activities today, with 68.4% projected (The CMO Survey, 2026).
• Generative AI alone accounts for 22.4% of marketing activity, up from 7% two years ago (The CMO Survey, 2026).
• 86.4% of marketing teams use AI in at least a few areas. 1.7% have no plans to (HubSpot, 2026).
• 95% of senior B2B marketers use AI at least weekly and 65% use it daily (LinkedIn and Ipsos, 1,500 marketers, 2025).
• 32% of senior B2B marketers rate their own understanding of AI as extremely good (LinkedIn and Ipsos, 2025).
• 89% of B2B marketers use AI content tools. 87% report better productivity and 39% report better content performance (Content Marketing Institute, 1,015 marketers, 2025).
• 20% of B2B marketing teams call their AI use exploratory, 48% developing and 8% advanced or leading (Content Marketing Institute, 2025).
• Content creation is the top AI use case at 73.9% of marketers (49.2% in late 2023). Personalization is second at 65.4% (The CMO Survey, 2026).
• Generative engine optimization was asked about for the first time in 2026 and already came in at 41.5% (The CMO Survey, 2026).

• Roughly a third of marketers each say AI saves them 1 to 9, 10 to 14 or 15 or more hours a week. 26.5% report a significant productivity increase (HubSpot, 2026).

How much do companies spend on AI in marketing?

CMOs allocate 15.3% of their marketing budgets to AI (Gartner 2026 CMO Spend Survey, 401 leaders).

• Marketing budgets sit at 7.8% of company revenue in 2026, flat on 2025 (Gartner, 2026).
• 56% of CMOs say their budget isn’t enough to deliver the 2026 strategy (Gartner, 2026).
• 30% of marketing organizations report mature AI readiness. Those that do put 21.3% of budget into AI and run budgets of 8.9% of revenue (Gartner, 2026).
• Martech’s share of marketing budget fell to a five-year low of 19.4% in 2026, from 26.6% in 2021 (Gartner via Chief Marketer,)
• Paid media rose to a five-year high of 31.4% of marketing budget (Gartner, 2026).
• 56% of CMOs moved martech spend to consumption-based pricing in the past year (Gartner, 2026).
• Utilization of the martech tools teams already own is 49% (Gartner 2025 Marketing Technology Survey).
• The martech product count reached 15,505 in 2026, up 0.79%. Additions fell 40% to 1,488 while 1,367 products were removed (chiefmartec, 2026).

AI in marketing market size

The “AI in marketing” market was worth between $10.4 billion and $58 billion in 2025, depending on the vendor. Scope explains part of the gap: Mordor Intelligence counts AI marketing platforms only, while MarketsandMarkets counts AI for sales and marketing together. Two other vendors start from the same 2024 number and the figure that leads many roundups is a 2021 forecast.

• Mordor Intelligence counts AI marketing platforms only and puts 2025 at $10.4 billion (Mordor Intelligence, 2026).
• MarketsandMarkets folds in sales AI and puts 2025 at $58 billion (MarketsandMarkets, 2025). 
• Projections for 2030 range from $82 billion to $241 billion across vendors (Mordor Intelligence, Precedence Research, The Business Research Company, MarketsandMarkets, 2025-2026).
• Grand View Research and Grand View Research share an identical 2024 base of $20.4 billion, which points to shared upstream inputs (2025-2026). 
• The $107 billion by 2028 figure that leads several roundups traces to an April 2021 estimate by The Insight Partners, published before ChatGPT existed (Statista, 2021). 

How much online content is AI-generated?

49.9% of new articles published online in Q1 2026 were AI-generated and 50.1% were human (Graphite, 55,400 URLs, three detectors, 2026).

• 4% of marketers use AI to write complete pieces and 80% review the output by hand (Ahrefs, 879 marketers, 2025).
• AI users publish 42% more content per month than non-users (Ahrefs, 2025).
• Graphite’s earlier claim that AI overtook human writing in November 2024 used a single detector and ran about 3.3 points high (Graphite, 2026).
• 74.2% of new web pages contain some AI text. 71.7% are mixed and 2.5% are purely machine-written (Ahrefs, 900,000 pages, 2025).
• 86% of articles ranking in Google are human-written. 7% of #1 results are AI-generated (Graphite, 31,493 keywords, 2025).
• 82% of the pages ChatGPT and Perplexity cite are human-written (Graphite, 2025).
• Human content holds 80.5% of #1 positions. Purely AI content holds 10% (Semrush, 42,000 blog pages, 2026).
• 70% of SEO professionals name speed as AI’s main benefit and 19% name quality (Semrush, 224 SEO professionals, 2026).
• 56% of marketers significantly revise or rewrite AI text (HubSpot, 2025). 
• 7% of marketers publish AI text unedited (HubSpot, 2025).
• 84% of companies don’t disclose that AI was involved in their content (Ahrefs, 2025).
• 41% of marketing leaders call “AI slop” a considerable problem (Canva and Harris Poll, 2026).
• 78% of consumers prefer human-made ads even if AI could make them better (Canva and Harris Poll, 3,547 consumers, 2026).

What share of Google searches are zero-click in 2026?

68.01% of US Google searches ended without a click between January and April 2026, up from 60.45% in 2024 and 49% in 2019 (SparkToro on Similarweb clickstream data, 2026).

• AI Overviews appear on more than 20% of US searches, while 0.34% of searches went to AI Mode (SparkToro, 2026).
• The 69% zero-click figure from Similarweb’s May 2025 study covered news searches only (Similarweb, 2025).
• The #1 organic result loses 58% of its clicks when an AI Overview appears. Positions 2 through 5 lose between 50.8% and 32.6% (Ahrefs, 300,000 keywords, 2026).

• The 34.5% click loss still quoted in roundups is Ahrefs’ 2025 figure, since superseded (Ahrefs, 2026).
• Google reported more than 2.5 billion monthly AI Overview users at I/O in May 2026 (1.5 billion in 2025). AI Mode passed 1 billion monthly users in its first year (Google I/O keynote, 2026).
• With an AI summary on the page, Google users clicked a traditional result on 8% of visits, versus 15% without one. They clicked a source inside the summary 1% of the time (Pew Research Center, 900 adults, 2025).
• The share of commercial-intent SERPs with an AI Overview grew 71% in the six months to April 2026 (Semrush, 600,000 keywords, 2026).
• 37.9% of URLs cited in AI Overviews rank in the top 10 for the same query, down from about 76% in 2025. 31% rank beyond position 100 (Ahrefs, 4 million cited URLs, 2026).
• YouTube is the most-cited domain in AI Overviews, up 34% in six months (Ahrefs, 2026).
• A citation inside an AI Overview delivers 120% more organic clicks per impression than no citation (Seer Interactive, 53 brands, 2026).
• Organic CTR on AI Overview queries fell 67% during 2025 for brands that weren’t cited, then recovered from 1.3% to 2.4% by February 2026 (Seer Interactive, 2026).
• Google referrals to publishers fell 33% globally and 38% in the US in the year to November 2025 (Reuters Institute on Chartbeat data, 2026).
• ChatGPT sends publishers 0.02% of their referrals (Reuters Institute, 2026).
• 45% of marketing leaders can’t accurately measure their brand’s visibility in AI answers and 9% have tools to track every metric they want (Semrush AI Visibility Index, 126 million prompts, 2026).

How much traffic do ChatGPT and AI assistants send to websites?

AI assistants combined send 0.41% of website traffic, against 24.24% from Google Search, a gap of roughly 62x (Ahrefs tracker, 112,309 sites, August 2026).

• ChatGPT alone is 0.32% of website traffic, which makes it about 76% of all AI referrals (Ahrefs tracker, 2026).
• AI platforms sent 770.7 million referral visits a month in the year to May 2026, up 117.4% year over year (Similarweb, 2026).
• Marketplaces receive the most AI referrals, at 46.8 million visits a month, followed by finance sites (Similarweb, 2026).
• 49% of US adults use AI chatbots (33% in 2024) and about 24% use one daily (Pew Research Center, 5,119 adults, 2026).
• 60% of AI-referred visits land on a homepage, compared with 17% from organic search (SE Ranking, 101,574 sites, 2026).
• ChatGPT’s referral share rose 36.7% in a single month after it made brand names clickable in May 2026 (SE Ranking, 2026).
• The share of ChatGPT answers containing citations went from 1.6% in June 2025 to 6.8% in May 2026 (Similarweb, 2026).
• 26% of ChatGPT responses now carry ads (Similarweb, 2026).

How well does AI traffic convert?

AI-referred visitors to US retail sites converted 42% better than other traffic in Q1 2026. A year earlier they converted 38% worse (Adobe Analytics via TechCrunch, 2026).

• AI traffic to US retail sites was up 393% year over year in Q1 2026 (Adobe Analytics, 2026).
• Adobe’s year-over-year growth figure went from 693% in the 2025 holiday season to 393% in Q1 2026 and 138% by May (Adobe Analytics, 2026).
• AI-sourced traffic and orders to Shopify stores roughly tripled year over year in Q2 2026 (Shopify Q2 2026 earnings call, via Retail TouchPoints).
• Half of AI sessions on Shopify stores land directly on a product page, 2.5x the rate for traditional search (Shopify, 2026).
• AI and agents influenced 20% of global online holiday sales, worth $262 billion (Salesforce, 2026).
• AI-search referrals converted nine times more often than social referrals during the 2025 holiday season (Salesforce, 2026).
• AI search was 0.5% of Ahrefs’ own traffic and 12.1% of its signups in mid-2025, a 23x conversion rate. It is a single site, so read it as a signal about intent (Ahrefs, 2025).
• The average AI search visitor is worth 4.4x the average organic visitor on a conversion-rate basis (Semrush, 2025).
• ChatGPT cites pages ranking 21 or lower almost 90% of the time (Semrush, 2025).

How do B2B buyers use AI to choose software?

51% of B2B software buyers start research in an AI chatbot more often than in Google (G2, The Answer Economy, 1,076 buyers, 2026).

• 69% of B2B buyers chose a different vendor than they planned because of a chatbot’s recommendation (G2, 2026).
• 71% rely on a chatbot at some point in the research process (G2, 2026).
• One in three B2B buyers bought from a vendor they had never heard of before (G2, 2026).
• 85% think more highly of a vendor that appears in an AI answer (G2, 2026).
• The strongest trust signal inside AI answers is a citation from a software review site (G2, 2026).
• 82% of B2B buyers sourced software recommendations from a chatbot in the past 24 months (G2 2026 Buyer Behavior Report).
• Seven in ten B2B buyers are pushing for shorter contracts (G2, 2026).
• Preference for outcome-based pricing among B2B buyers rose from 11% to 23% in a year (G2, 2026).
• Companies where more than half the pipeline is AI-influenced convert lead-to-MQL 11% better and MQL-to-SQL 8% better. SQL-to-closed-won improves only 1% (ICONIQ State of Go-to-Market 2026, 150+ B2B software GTM executives, via SaaStr).
• Channel and partnership revenue at B2B software companies rose from 21% of revenue in the first half of 2025 to 29% in the second half, with 31% projected for 2026 (ICONIQ, 2026).
• Direct sales fell from 73% to 57% of revenue at B2B software companies over the same period (ICONIQ, 2026).
• AI-native SaaS companies show a median net revenue retention of 48%, against 82% for conventional B2B SaaS (Growth Unhinged on ChartMogul data, about 3,500 companies, 2025).
• AI products priced above $250 a month retain 85% of revenue. Those under $50 retain 32% (Growth Unhinged, 2025). For a partner program on an AI product, that churn shows up in the commission math, which is why FirstPromoter’s setup for AI companies ties commissions to each billing event.

Agentic commerce statistics

OpenAI wound down ChatGPT Instant Checkout in March 2026, six months after launch and now routes buyers to merchants’ own sites (Storyboard18, citing TechCrunch, 2026).

• Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol launched in January 2026 with Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target and Walmart. No platform has disclosed transaction volumes for it (Google, 2026).
• Amazon’s Rufus reached more than 300 million customers and nearly $12 billion in incremental annualized sales in 2025 (Amazon Q4 2025 results, via Digital Commerce 360).
• 11% of US consumers are willing to let AI make a purchase decision for them (Gartner, 2026).
• Among consumers who used AI for a recent purchase, 54% had to double-check everything it told them (Gartner, 2026).
• 62% of consumers who used AI for a recent purchase called it a waste of time (Gartner, 2026).
• About half of consumers are not comfortable letting an AI complete a transaction (Bain, 2025).
• Consumers trust a retailer’s own agent 3x more than a third-party agent (Bain, 2025).
• 50% of AI-using shoppers bought something after using AI in their research (Semrush, 1,030 US shoppers, 2025). 
• Only 22% of AI-using shoppers bought inside the AI tool itself (Semrush, 2025). 
• 86% of AI-using shoppers verify AI brand recommendations at least sometimes. They check on Google (68%), the brand’s site (48%) or review sites (35%) (Semrush, 2025). 
• Forecasts for US agentic commerce in 2030 range from $300-500 billion (Bain, 2025) to up to $1 trillion (McKinsey, 2025). The gap comes mostly from how each firm defines the category.

Do consumers trust AI-generated marketing?

50% of US consumers would rather give their business to brands that don’t use generative AI in consumer-facing content (Gartner, 1,539 consumers, 2026).

• 76% of Americans say it is extremely or very important to be able to tell whether content was made by AI and 53% are not confident they can (Pew Research Center, 2025).
• 52% of Americans are more concerned than excited about AI as of August 2026. For the first time that includes a majority of under-30s, at 55% (Pew Research Center, 2026).
• 62% of Americans say using AI to create people or voices in ads is unacceptable, even with disclosure (Bentley University and Gallup, 2026).
• 49% of Americans view AI-created ads negatively, against 19% who view them positively (Bentley University and Gallup, 2026).
• Human-made ads scored 14% higher on short-term effectiveness and 17% higher on long-term brand equity than AI versions of the same brief (Ipsos and Syracuse Newhouse, 20 ads, 3,000 consumers, 2026).
• Only 25% of viewers were able to tell which ads were AI-made (Ipsos and Syracuse Newhouse, 2026).
• Labeling Instagram content as “AI-generated” cut engagement by 14 to 16 percentage points against the same content attributed to a person (Electronic Markets, two experiments, 2026).
• 55% of social users are more likely to trust brands that publish human-made content (Sprout Social, 2025).
• 50% of Gen Z have unfollowed a brand or creator because its content felt like AI (Sprout Social Q1 2026 Pulse Survey).
• 82% of ad executives believe Gen Z and Millennial consumers feel positive about AI ads. 45% of those consumers say they do, a 37-point gap (IAB, 2026).
• More than 60% of active gen AI users express high trust in its results. Shopping-related use grew 35% between February and November 2025 (BCG, nine countries, 2026).
• 45% of US consumers have asked AI for a local business recommendation, against 6% in 2025. 97% of them double-check against real reviews at least sometimes (BrightLocal, 2026).

AI in influencer marketing statistics

26% of consumers prefer AI-generated creator content, down from 60% in 2023 (Billion Dollar Boy, 6,000 US and UK respondents, 2025).

• TikTok has labeled more than 3 billion videos as AI-generated (TikTok Newsroom, 2026). 
• 79% of marketers are increasing investment in AI-generated creator content (Billion Dollar Boy, 2025).
• 87% of creators increased their own gen AI use (Billion Dollar Boy, 2025).
• 35% of consumers say AI gives high-quality product recommendations, against 79% of marketers who think it does (Billion Dollar Boy, 2025).
• 61% of marketers see AI as a threat to the peer-to-peer recommendation model they pay creators for (Billion Dollar Boy, 2025).
• 56% of AI shoppers prefer recommendations that include creator perspectives (IAB Insights Engine and Attest, 2,200 consumers, 2026).
• 65% of AI shoppers feel more confident when a credible creator review sits behind the answer (IAB, The Creator Signal, 2026).
• The most trusted creator type in AI recommendations is the everyday consumer, at 52% (IAB, 2026).
• 36.67% of influencer marketers use AI for creator discovery, 21.11% for content generation and 7.22% for fraud detection (Influencer Marketing Hub Benchmark Report, 2026). 
• Gartner predicts brands will put 50% of influencer budgets into content authenticity and creator verification by 2027 (Gartner, 2026).
• 78% of US consumers rate explicit AI labeling as very important or the single most important factor for trust (Gartner, 2026).
• YouTube now applies labels automatically when it detects photorealistic AI. Instagram added an “AI creator” account label in May 2026. Labeling obligations are tightening in the EU and several US states as well. 

AI in affiliate marketing statistics

More than 95% of citations in AI-generated answers come from third-party content, not brand-owned pages (Acceleration Partners, May 2026 AI Strategy Brief).

• In one category, 16 of the 25 publishers AI cited most were already active in the brand’s affiliate program (Acceleration Partners, 2026).
• More than 40% of the 10,000 sources AI models cite most carry affiliate links or sponsorship (Evertune, 2025).
• Listicles account for 63% of citations by volume across roughly 400 million citations from six AI platforms. “Best X” ranked lists are 71-86% of those listicles (Evertune, 2026).
• 69% of senior leaders at B2B SaaS companies above $50 million in revenue plan to increase partnership investment (PartnerStack and Wynter, 100 leaders, 2025).
• 30% of those leaders call partnerships a top strategic priority for 2026 (PartnerStack and Wynter, 2025).
• Forrester expects 75% of enterprise B2B companies to raise influencer-relations budgets in 2026 (Forrester Predictions 2026: B2B, 2025).
• Programs track AI visibility mostly through basic brand-mention monitoring. Dedicated tools are still rare (PMA 2026 US Brand Survey). 
• Fraud rates reach 5.2% in AI-driven ad campaigns, about double platform averages, within an estimated $32.6 billion in global ad fraud losses for 2025 (Spider Labs, 2026).
• Made-for-advertising inventory grew 1,409% year over year (Spider Labs, 2026).
• Cloudflare Radar measured crawl-to-refer ratios of 887:1 for OpenAI and 118:1 for Perplexity in the first week of August 2025. About 80% of AI-bot crawling is for model training (Cloudflare, 2025).
• 78% of US consumers believe AI shopping recommendations are already influenced by advertisers (PartnerCentric, 2025).

For the wider channel benchmarks, see the affiliate marketing statistics for 2026. For tracking which of your referrals arrive from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or Copilot, FirstPromoter’s referral records carry the entry source, traffic source and referrer URL. See the affiliate tracking software page [internal URL to confirm at upload].

What is the ROI of AI in marketing?

96% of CMOs say AI is transforming the entire marketing function and 8% run campaigns with multiple autonomous agents (BCG, 300 CMOs, 2026).

• Marketing training budgets fell to 3.8% of spend, from 5.8% before the pandemic, while 35.7% of leaders cite AI capability gaps (The CMO Survey, 2026).
• 42% of CMOs use generative AI only to help people with individual tasks (BCG, 2026).
• 43% of companies invested more than $15 million in AI marketing this year, versus 28% a year earlier (BCG, 2026).
• Significant measurable revenue impact from AI was reported by 31% of B2C CMOs and 20% of B2B CMOs (BCG, 2026).
• 37% of organizations report any EBIT impact from AI, unchanged from last year (McKinsey, The State of AI 2026, 1,719 respondents, via The Register).
• Marketing and sales is the function where AI revenue gains are reported most often (McKinsey, 2026).
• 39% of organizations expect AI-related headcount cuts next year, against 14% that saw them last year (McKinsey, 2026).
• 41% of marketers can prove AI ROI, down from 49% a year earlier (Jasper, 1,400 marketers, 2026).
• 45% of martech leaders say vendor-offered AI agents fail to meet the performance they were sold on (Gartner, 2025).
• Marketing leaders estimate AI raised sales productivity 14.1% and cut marketing overhead 14.6%, both self-reported (The CMO Survey, 2026).
• B2B marketers who build AI into strategy as well as execution report 13% revenue growth, again self-reported (LinkedIn and Ipsos, 2025).
• 80% of CMOs name staff fear and anxiety as a barrier to AI experimentation (Gartner, 2026).

What AI marketing statistics mean for subscription businesses

AI answers draw mostly on third-party content: more than 95% of citations come from third-party pages, and listicles take 63% of them. For a subscription business, that makes partners who publish reviews and comparisons part of how buyers find software. For the affiliate side of the channel, see our affiliate marketing statistics for 2026. FirstPromoter connects to Stripe, Chargebee, Paddle, Recurly or Braintree and tracks each referral against actual subscription revenue. Start a free trial and you can be live within a day, with 14 days free and no credit card required.