On this page · 9 sections
- What Gartner actually predicted, and when
- Scorecard: the 25% forecast against 2026 data
- Why volume held while clicks fell
- The forecasts due in 2027, and the evidence so far
- What marketers should do in 2027
- Worked example: when search volume and traffic diverge
- Notes for India, the UK and the US
- How eCorpIT can help
- References
Summary. In a press release dated 19 February 2024, Gartner forecast that traditional search engine volume would fall 25% by 2026 as search marketing lost share to AI chatbots and other virtual agents. It was a prediction with no published baseline or counting method, and we found no measurement showing a 25% fall in total search. Google says its queries hit an all-time high in early 2026 and grew at their fastest year-on-year rate in five years in the third quarter. Independent panels are mixed: Datos and SparkToro reported Google desktop searches per US searcher down nearly 20% in 2025 before a partial recovery, while a Fractl study of Semrush keyword data found total volume flat. Clicks are what fell. Similarweb data analysed by SparkToro puts 68.01% of US Google searches in January to April 2026 at no click, and Ahrefs data shows Google's share of traffic to 118,671 sites falling from 35.1% to 24.7% between June 2025 and October 2026. AI chatbots sent 0.14% of Statcounter's tracked referrals in October 2026. Plan 2027 on your own impressions and clicks, and watch Gartner's 2028 forecast instead.
About this article. For marketing, SEO and analytics leads setting 2027 budgets in India, the UK and the US. We checked each Gartner forecast against Gartner's own newsroom release, and each measurement against its publisher (Alphabet, Google, Statcounter, Ahrefs, Sensor Tower, SparkToro, Semrush, Fractl), with Datos figures taken from trade-press reports of its gated reports, on 7 November 2026. Vendors revise their data, so treat every figure as dated. This is not financial advice, and no vendor paid for inclusion. Researched with AI assistance and reviewed by our editorial team.
What Gartner actually predicted, and when
The forecast everyone quotes comes from a Gartner press release dated 19 February 2024. It said that by 2026 traditional search engine volume would drop 25%, with search marketing losing market share to AI chatbots and other virtual agents. It drew on a client report, Predicts 2024: How GenAI Will Reshape Tech Marketing, and was aimed at technology marketers.
Alan Antin, a Vice President Analyst at Gartner, gave the reasoning: generative AI tools were becoming substitute answer engines for queries that would once have gone to a search engine, so companies would have to rethink their channel strategy. The release added that content quality would still decide organic results and that authenticating valuable content, for example by watermarking, would matter more.
Read it as a forecast, not a measurement. The release gives no baseline year, no definition of traditional search volume and no counting method, and in March 2024 Antin told Big Technology that Gartner does not calculate search counts itself. It is also unclear whether queries in Google's AI Mode count as traditional search or as the AI substitute Gartner described.
Gartner has made related marketing forecasts in releases dated 14 December 2023, 15 January 2025 and 15 January 2026. The table paraphrases those on search, AI assistants and AI agents.
| Release date | Gartner forecast (paraphrased) | Due | Measurable in public data? |
|---|---|---|---|
| 14 Dec 2023 | Brands' organic search traffic falls 50% or more as consumers adopt generative AI search | 2028 | Partly, through traffic panels |
| 14 Dec 2023 | 20% of brands position themselves on the absence of AI | 2027 | Only through surveys |
| 19 Feb 2024 | Traditional search engine volume drops 25% as chatbots and virtual agents take share | 2026 | Yes, but the measure is undefined |
| 15 Jan 2025 | Mobile app usage falls 25% because of AI assistants | 2027 | Yes, through app panels |
| 15 Jan 2025 | Over a third of web content is created for generative AI search | 2026 | No reliable measure |
| 15 Jan 2025 | 85% of customer data comes from automated or AI-agent interactions | 2027 | No public measure |
| 15 Jan 2025 | Marketers move 30% of paid social budgets to subscription channels | 2028 | Through spend surveys |
| 15 Jan 2026 | 60% of brands use agentic AI for one-to-one interactions | 2028 | Through surveys |
| 15 Jan 2026 | Brands put 50% of influencer budgets into authenticity initiatives | 2027 | Through spend surveys |
Some rest on survey data. The December 2023 release cited 299 consumers surveyed in August 2023, of whom 79% expected to use AI-enhanced search within a year. The January 2025 release cited Gartner's 2024 CMO Spend Survey of 395 respondents, in which the average CMO put almost a quarter of the digital marketing budget into search.
Scorecard: the 25% forecast against 2026 data
None of these sources measures exactly what Gartner described, so the last column is our judgement. Sources: Alphabet and Google, Datos as reported by MarTech and PPC Land, Semrush, Fractl, Statcounter, SparkToro and Ahrefs.
| Source | Period | What it measures | Finding | Bearing on the forecast |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Alphabet Q3 2026 results | Jul to Sep 2026 | Google query growth, worldwide | Fastest year-on-year growth rate in five years; no count given | Against |
| Google I/O post | Jan to Mar 2026 | Total Google queries | All-time high; AI Mode past one billion monthly users | Against |
| Datos with SparkToro | 2025 vs 2024 | Google searches per US desktop searcher | Down nearly 20%; EU and UK down 2 to 3% | Closest to the forecast, US desktop only |
| Datos with SparkToro | Dec 2025 to Mar 2026 | Same measure | Up from 95.3 to 102.5 a month | Partial recovery |
| Semrush | Jan 2024 to Jun 2025 | Google sessions before and after first ChatGPT use, US desktop | No significant change | Against substitution |
| Fractl on Semrush data | 12 months to Apr 2026 | Volume of 1,010,848 high-volume keywords | 29% of volume in declining keywords, net change about zero | Redistribution, not decline |
| Statcounter | Oct 2026 | Referral share worldwide: search, social, AI chatbots | Search 91.47%, AI chatbots 0.14% | Against: assistants still small |
| SparkToro with Similarweb | Jan to Apr 2026 | US Google searches ending without a click | 68.01%, against 60.45% in 2024 | For the traffic concern |
| Ahrefs benchmark | Jun 2025 to Oct 2026 | Google's share of traffic to 118,671 sites | 35.1% down to 24.7% | For the traffic concern |
Four caveats. Google gives growth rates and records, not audited counts; its last public total was more than 5 trillion searches in 2024, as SparkToro noted. The Datos panel is desktop only. SparkToro's 2024 and 2026 zero-click numbers come from different panels (Datos, then Similarweb), the 2026 data leaves out Google's mobile app, and the two panels count zero-click searches differently. Statcounter measures referrals to sites carrying its code, not searches typed; its AI chatbot share has stayed between 0.14% and 0.43% every month from April 2025 to October 2026.
The Fractl study is the only one claiming Gartner was right, so read it closely. Its 29% is the share of tracked volume in keywords that fell more than 15% in a year. Growing keywords added about 10.31 billion monthly searches against about 10.29 billion in decline, so the net change across 35.4 billion monthly searches was close to zero. People changed what they search for, not how much.
The verdict: on the evidence available on 7 November 2026, total search volume did not drop 25%. The nearest measure, US desktop searches per searcher, fell nearly 20% in 2025 and then partly recovered. The mechanism Gartner described, generative AI as a substitute answer engine, did arrive, mostly inside Google through AI Overviews and AI Mode, which kept the queries and cut the clicks.
Why volume held while clicks fell
Google built the substitute answer engine into its own results. On 28 October 2026 Sundar Pichai said AI Mode queries are on average three times longer than traditional searches, that one in five AI Mode searches uses voice, images or documents, and that Google handles more than 50 billion visual searches a month. Google Search and other revenue rose 12% year on year in the third quarter of 2026, from $56.57 billion to $63.35 billion.
Chatbots grew alongside search rather than instead of it. Sensor Tower reported that generative AI app downloads doubled in 2025 to 3.8 billion and that time spent in them reached 48 billion hours, about 3.6 times the 2024 total. Google says its Gemini app has reached one billion users. Yet Semrush found that US desktop users who took up ChatGPT in early 2025 kept searching Google as often as before. Assistant referral data is also noisy: in Statcounter's UK series, ChatGPT's share of AI-chatbot referrals fell from about 80% in September 2026 to about 44% in October, while Gemini's rose from about 10% to about 31%. Read single months with care.
The click side is where marketers feel it. SparkToro found that the share of US Google searches producing a click of any kind fell 9.51 points between 2024 and 2026, a 22.9% decline, while the share of searchers running another search rose 7.2 points. Datos's Q2 2026 report, as summarised by Search Engine Journal, called June 2026 a record low, with 40% of US desktop searches sending a click to the open web. Ahrefs' fixed set of 118,671 sites received about 473 million Google-referred visits in June 2025 and about 298 million in October 2026, a fall of about 37%, while AI assistants' share of their traffic rose from 0.27% to 0.46%. People search as much or more, and leave Google less often.
The forecasts due in 2027, and the evidence so far
Mobile app usage down 25% because of AI assistants. Gartner expected smartphone users to turn to assistants such as Apple Intelligence, ChatGPT, Google Gemini and Meta AI in place of many apps. Sensor Tower points the other way so far: people spent 5.3 trillion hours in iOS and Google Play apps in 2025, up 3.8%, or roughly 3.6 hours a day per mobile user, and downloads rose 0.8% to nearly 150 billion. Assistants are apps too, so substitution may show inside categories before it shows in totals. Sensor Tower's next annual report, due early in 2027 if it keeps its January timing, is the first real test.
85% of customer data from automated or AI-agent interactions. No public dataset measures this, and the release does not define the denominator. The risk Gartner's Emily Weiss named is concrete, though: fewer app users means less first-party data and fewer people reachable by push notification.
20% of brands positioning on the absence of AI. Measurable only through surveys. Gartner's January 2026 release adds that 78% of 335 US consumers surveyed in late 2025 rated clear labelling of AI-generated content as very important or the most important factor for trust.
50% of influencer budgets to authenticity initiatives. Gartner links this to engagement and monetisation in AI search. Expect budget surveys, not traffic data, to score it.
Looking to 2028: organic search traffic down 50% or more. This is the forecast worth tracking monthly. In the Ahrefs cohort, Google's share of traffic fell about 30% in relative terms in 16 months. That counts all Google referrals, paid and organic, on sites using Ahrefs' analytics, but it is moving in Gartner's direction. Weiss's December 2023 advice still holds: brands that depend on SEO should test other channels to diversify.
What marketers should do in 2027
- Retire the 25% headline from planning decks. Use two numbers from your own Search Console instead: impressions for demand and clicks for traffic, split by country, because the panels above are mostly US desktop.
- Build an impressions-to-clicks gap report. Track it monthly by query group and annotate Google launches and core updates. Search Console's generative AI report has covered all websites since 31 August 2026 but shows impressions only. For UK users, the CMA's publisher conduct requirement gives Google until 3 December 2026 to supply impressions, clicks and click-through rate for AI search features. Our guide to the Search Console generative AI report and the CMA metrics explains how to set a baseline.
- Budget from marginal returns, not forecasts. Gartner's own survey found search taking almost a quarter of digital budgets. Move a test slice, sized to your data, into channels you can measure, and keep it only if it earns its place.
- Measure AI assistants at their real size. Segment referrals from chatgpt.com, gemini.google.com, perplexity.ai and copilot.microsoft.com in GA4 with conversions, and run a fixed monthly prompt panel. At under half a per cent of tracked traffic in both the Statcounter and Ahrefs data, assistants deserve a line in the plan, not the whole plan.
- Shift some KPIs from visits to visibility. Track whether you are named and linked in AI Overviews and assistant answers, plus branded search and direct traffic. Our AEO, GEO and SEO guide covers the content side.
- Make content worth citing. Gartner's 2024 release put content quality first, and its 2026 release adds labelling. Publish original data, named authors and clear sources, and label AI-assisted material.
- Stress-test app dependence. If revenue runs through an app, plan for lower app usage, as Gartner advised, and make key actions work on the web.
- Watch the UK choice screens. The CMA has proposed letting AI assistants appear on Google's Android and Chrome search choice screens and expects a final decision by the end of 2026. Our piece on the CMA search choice screen for AI assistants sets out the proposal.
Worked example: when search volume and traffic diverge
This illustration uses round numbers, not client data. A UK-facing B2B site gets 100,000 Google impressions a month at a 3.0% click-through rate, so 3,000 clicks.
A year later, impressions rise 5% to 105,000 because demand grew, while click-through falls to 2.3% as AI Overviews answer more queries on the page. Clicks are now 105,000 × 2.3% = 2,415, a fall of (3,000 - 2,415) ÷ 3,000 = 19.5%, while search volume rose. At £2 of pipeline per organic visit on your own attribution model, monthly value falls from £6,000 to £4,830.
Gartner's headline reads this as search dying. Your data says demand is healthy and the loss is in click capture, which needs different fixes: better titles and answer blocks for cited visibility, stronger conversion on the visits you keep, and paid or AI-placement tests where the click has moved.
| Your data shows | Likely reading | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Impressions up, clicks down | AI answers absorbing clicks | Optimise for citation; lift conversion on remaining visits; report visibility |
| Impressions down, clicks down | Demand or ranking loss | Check rankings, core update dates and content freshness |
| Impressions flat, AI referrals rising | Audience adding assistants | Answer assistant-style questions; track AI referral conversions |
| Branded search rising, clicks steady | Brand work paying off | Keep brand and PR spend; protect branded paid terms |
| App sessions falling, web steady | Possible assistant substitution or app churn | Move key journeys and data capture to the web |
If the second row describes you, start with our core update recovery playbook before blaming AI.
Notes for India, the UK and the US
Most of the clickstream evidence above is from US panels, and Statcounter's 0.14% is worldwide. Country shares are smaller: in September 2026 AI chatbots sent 0.18% of tracked referrals in the US, 0.10% in the UK and 0.14% in India, and October readings were lower still. Indian marketers should read their own Search Console by country before applying US zero-click rates; our AI Mode ads playbook for India covers the paid side. UK teams face two regulatory dates: AI-feature click metrics due from 3 December 2026 and a choice-screen decision expected by the end of 2026. US teams have the deepest panel data.
How eCorpIT can help
eCorpIT is a Gurugram-based technology organisation, founded in 2021, assessed at CMMI Level 5 and MSME certified, with senior-led engineering teams working across AWS, Microsoft and Google platforms. Our performance marketing services team can build your impressions-to-clicks gap report, segment AI-assistant referrals in GA4 and rebalance search budgets against your own conversion data. Talk to us at /contact-us/.
Last updated: 7 November 2026.
