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This is the most up-to-date list of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) statistics for 2026.
From search engine market share to zero-click search to local SEO, we’ve curated 35+ SEO statistics to help marketing leaders stay ahead.
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Editor’s Pick: Top SEO Statistics
- The top three organic positions on Google capture 68.7% of all clicks (Source).
- Commercial keywords triggering an AI Overview increased from 8.15% in October 2024 to 18.57% in October 2025, a year-on-year (YoY) increase of 128% (Source).
- Position 1 result in Google has an average of 3.8x more backlinks than positions 2 – 10 (Source).
- Pages with schema markup see a 40% higher CTR in search results (Source).
- An eCommerce site with a 1-second load speed has a 2.5x higher conversion rate than a site that loads in 5 seconds (Source).
- 72% of consumers use Google Search to find local businesses (Source).
Search Engine Statistics
Google continues to dominate in 2026. For marketing leaders focused on revenue growth, this concentration of market share makes one thing clear: getting to the top of Google is non-negotiable.
But while Google captures the majority of search activity, platforms like Bing still represent meaningful audiences, particularly for B2B brands targeting senior, affluent, and highly educated decision-makers.
At the same time, shifts in user behaviour and AI Search are reshaping how search demand is distributed. The marketing leaders who adapt early will capture the advantage.
- Across many sites, organic search accounts for around 53.3% of all website traffic, far more than social or paid channels (Source).
- It is predicted that search engine volume will drop by 25% by this year as AI platforms gain more ground (Source).
- Google accounts for 89.98% of the global search engine market share (Source).
- Google processes over 5 trillion searches annually (Source).
- The first page of Google captures 99% of all clicks (Source).
- The average click-through rate (CTR) for organic position 1 on Google is 39.8%, followed by 18.7% for position 2 and 10.2% for position 3 (Source).
- The second largest search engine is Bing, holding 5.01% of global market share (Source) with 100 million daily users (Source).
- Bing’s user base skews older, more educated, and higher-income than the broader search population (Source).
In 2026, an effective SEO strategy is not about choosing between Google vs Bing. It’s about ensuring your brand is visible wherever your target customers are searching and aligning that visibility with measurable revenue outcomes.
Zero-Click Search Statistics
Zero-click searches became a major SEO trend in 2025. In 2026, they are simply how search works.
Google’s AI Overviews are a major driver behind rising impressions and declining clicks. Users get the information they need within the AI-generated summary without clicking through to a website. This has led to “the great decoupling:” higher impressions but lower click-through rates.
- A study revealed that 80% of users rely on zero-click results at least 40% of the time (Source).
- Mobile searches have a higher rate of zero-click search at 77.2% compared to 46.5% on desktop searches (Source).
- AI Overviews appear for 15.69% of all keywords as of November 2025 (Source).
- Commercial keywords triggering an AI Overview increased from 8.15% in October 2024 to 18.57% in October 2025, a year-on-year (YoY) increase of 128% (Source).
- New data shows that AI Overviews correlate with a 58% lower CTR for the top-ranking page, increasing from 35% in March 2025 (Source).
- Only 1% of users click on sources cited within an AI Overview (Source).
Offsite SEO Statistics
Offsite SEO remains one of the strongest levers for competitive advantage in 2026. While on-page optimisation gets you in the game, backlinks remain one of Google’s most important ranking signals.
- Position 1 result in Google has an average of 3.8x more backlinks than positions 2 – 10 (Source).
- 40.7% of marketers cite content marketing as the top strategy for building organic backlinks passively (Source).
- Digital PR is now one of the most effective link-building tactics, growing as a method for earning high-quality backlinks and brand mentions (Source).
- 78.1% of SEO professionals report satisfying ROI from link-building efforts (Source).
Improving your offsite signals also strengthens your AI Search Optimisation strategy. An Ahrefs study found that AI Overviews tend to favour brands with higher volumes of web-wide brand mentions, not just traditional backlinks.
This means authority now influences both rankings and AI visibility. Brands that invest in digital PR, high-value content, and strategic link acquisition are building assets that compound across traditional search and AI-driven results.
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Technical SEO Statistics
Technical SEO is the foundation of search performance. You can produce high-converting content and build strong backlinks, but if your site is slow, poorly structured, or difficult for search engines to crawl, performance will suffer.
- 88.5% of survey respondents said slow loading time is the top reason visitors leave a website (Source).
- A one-second delay in page load time can decrease conversion rates by 7% (Source).
- Pages with schema markup see a 40% higher CTR in search results (Source).
- 57.5% of top-ranking eCommerce pages have implemented some form of schema markup (Source).
- 23% of websites have pages that do not link to their XML sitemap in robots.txt (Source).
- 15% of websites are missing an XML sitemap (Source).
- A technical SEO campaign focused on technical fixes and optimisation can deliver a 117% ROI (Source).
It’s not just traditional search results that improve when you nail your technical SEO. A study by Aiso found that there was a 30% improvement in AI visibility for websites with schema markup.
eCommerce SEO Statistics
For B2B and B2C brands alike, eCommerce SEO is a growth lever that compounds over time. Invest your SEO budget properly, and you lower acquisition costs while increasing conversion performance.
- 43% of all eCommerce traffic comes from Google search (Source).
- 23.6% of eCommerce orders are directly linked to organic traffic (Source).
- eCommerce websites achieve average conversion rates of 2.4% (Source).
- The average eCommerce brand ranks for 1,783 keywords in the organic search results (Source).
- An eCommerce site with a 1-second load speed has a 2.5x higher conversion rate than a site that loads in 5 seconds (Source).
- Product pages with customer reviews receive 18% more sales than those without (Source).
Local SEO Statistics
If your business has a physical presence or serves customers in specific regions, these local SEO statistics reveal just how much online behaviour translates into offline action. This means your online local visibility has a direct and measurable impact on revenue.
- 72% of consumers use Google Search to find local businesses (Source).
- The three most trusted websites for researching local businesses are Google (66%), Google Maps (45%), and a business’s own website (36%) (Source).
- 76% of people who perform a local search on their smartphone visit the business within 24 hours, and 28% of those searches result in a purchase (Source).
- A complete Google Business Profile is 70% more likely to attract visitors and 50% more likely to be considered for a purchase (Source).
- Only 7.9% of local searches trigger an AI Overview (Source).
- Dedicated service pages, strong internal linking, authority inbound links, and geographically-relevant keywords are cited as the strongest organic ranking factors in local SEO (Source).
Get Ahead in Search in 2026
These top SEO statistics paint a clear picture in 2026:
- Search engines still dominate demand generation, and organic search drives the majority of website traffic.
- Zero-click searches are rising, which means visibility and brand presence matter as much as clicks.
- Backlinks and brand mentions remain critical for rankings and influencing AI Search results.
- Technical SEO improvements, such as speed and structured data, can increase conversions and ROI.
Want to know how your business is performing in organic search? Request a free marketing review, and we’ll show you exactly where the opportunities are.
Looking to get ahead in AI Search? Read:
