Google AI Overview Has 1 Billion Users a Month Now. Here’s What it Means for Your Business.

TL;DR: Google has reported that their AI mode has surpassed 1 billion monthly users, up from 100 million this time last year, and that is a very big deal in terms of marketing your business.

For most of my career, being found meant ranking on Google. That’s still important, but we all know it’s not the whole picture anymore. Your future customers will increasingly discover your business across a growing set of large language models (LLMs). The businesses that understand this early and act on it are the ones that will keep growing.

With 1 billion users and counting, AI is integral to search now. Here are three major takeaways for your business. 

Takeway 1: Your Search Traffic Might Drop, But Your Revenue Doesn’t Have To

Let me start with the part that, understandably, makes people nervous. Your organic traffic is probably going to fall, if it hasn’t already. Two years ago, Gartner predicted that traditional search engine volume would drop 25% by 2026 as people move their questions to AI chatbots and virtual agents, and the data since has since closely reflected that direction. 

Xponent21 founder and CEO, Will Melton, has been documenting Google’s own shift: as of July 2026, more than 70% of U.S. searches now return an AI Overview, up from about 25% two years earlier. When Google answers the question right on the results page, fewer people click through to find it themselves. Pew Research studied nearly 69,000 searches and found that users clicked a traditional link on only 8% of visits when an AI summary appeared, compared with 15% when it did not, and they clicked a link inside the summary itself just 1% of the time.

This is where you can exhale: the drop in traffic does not have to mean a drop in revenue. On the journey to successfully marketing a business, we’re just changing lanes, not destinations. 

“AI agents now generate more than half of all queries to AI, deployed by someone to go solve a problem,” says Melton. “AI Visibility matters more than ever because Google is sending less traffic to websites. Fewer people are leaving search results, or leaving the chatbot, to learn more, because they can get everything they need right in that same interface.”

This is the proverbial lane change I’m talking about. We used to strive for rankings, and while we still do, we have to include adjusting the way we market to accommodate how people search for answers using AI. My job is to make sure your business is part of that answer, so you can keep growing your revenue.

Doing that well takes tools built for both traditional SEO and generative engines and practitioners who understand the industry deeply enough to know when a shift is coming and can navigate it while growing your business throughout times of change. 

Takeaway 2: Being Visible to Bots Now Matters as Much as Being Visible to People

Bots the 21st century couriers of your brand, and this is only going to become more pervasive as time goes on. As Melton pointed out, based on Cloudflare’s report, we know that over 60% of web traffic is from bots—many of which are AI assistants, bringing their recommendation to your business (or someone else’s, if you’re not on top of your AI visibility game). 

“This technology will keep evolving, but one thing is clear: computers are going to do more for humans, so we need to be visible to computers as much as we are to humans. If we’re not shaping both how often we show up and what AI is saying about us, we’re missing a major opportunity to grow,” Melton says. 

Optimizing for a machine that reads, summarizes, and recommends on your customer’s behalf is a genuinely different discipline than chasing a ranking. The businesses that treat it seriously are the ones who will come out on top.

Takeaway 3: You Need Full AI Visibility into Your Business

I understand the instinct to open ChatGPT or Claude, type in your company name, and read whatever comes back, but it’s a misleading picture. These systems rewrite your query behind the scenes, personalize answers based on the individual asking, and change responses almost daily. There are better, much more efficient ways to learn about your business’s AI visibility, starting with the right questions. 

My colleague Kayleigh Crandell addressed this when she wrote “What Is AI Saying About My Business?” Is the Wrong Question. The better questions are more nuanced and require a certain level of understanding about how LLMs function. 

• What is AI telling the specific buyer you need to reach? 
• Does it recommend you for the high-value questions that land right at the decision moment? 
• How is that answer changing over time? 
• And what sources is the model drawing on to describe you?

These are the questions that move you from a quick snapshot of what an LLM is saying in the moment, to a fuller picture that you can work with. Because when you have a full picture of what is actually being said about your business, you can make decisions to fill gaps, be proactive ahead of your competitors, and more effectively meet prospective customers’ needs.

 A Citation Is Not a Recommendation

Most visibility tools gloss over the fact that citations do not automatically mean a positive for your revenue. Having your page cited inside an AI answer is not the same as having the AI recommend you. Models often pull a fact from your site, credit you as the source, and then recommend a competitor in the same answer. Being mentioned, being cited, and being recommended are three different outcomes that can have very different implications for your business.

Grow Your Business’s AI Visibility with CARL Intelligence 

You need visibility into where your business actually stands, which is exactly why we built CARL Intelligence and made it free for six months. 

“We built CARL Intelligence because the price to track a brand’s visibility in AI from existing platforms was astronomical, with a huge markup over the actual cost of capturing the data. So we engineered our own tool and made it free for people exploring this space,” Melton says.

CARL tracks prompts daily across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity, and gives you a comprehensive look into your company’s AI presence, so you can see not just whether you show up, but whether AI is actually sending buyers your way. Most companies need time and evidence to understand why this matters before they invest, which is why we decided to offer it to users for six months at no cost.

Start there, and pay close attention to what you learn: what your prospective customers are asking, what your competitors are solving that you are not, and how you can use that visibility to build the answers that bring those customers to you. The businesses that move on this now are the ones who will have the competitive advantage tomorrow. 

Get the full picture of your business’s AI visibility—for free—with CARL Intelligence.