AI Search in 2026: The Statistics Clinic Owners Should Know

A lot of the numbers quoted about AI search are recycled, rounded up or impossible to trace. This article only uses figures we could check against a named, public source, and every one links to it. Where a reliable number does not exist, we say so rather than fill the gap.

How many people use AI tools now?

OpenAI reported in February 2026 that ChatGPT has more than 900 million weekly active users worldwide.

In Australia, the Australian Internet Usage Survey found that 45.6 per cent of Australians had used a generative AI tool in the previous six months, as reported by the Australian Digital Inclusion Index in December 2025. Use was uneven across age groups and regions, so the figure for your own patient base may be higher or lower.

How many Australians ask AI about their health?

The clearest Australian figure comes from a study in the Medical Journal of Australia. It estimated that 9.9 per cent of Australian adults, about 1.9 million people, asked ChatGPT a health-related question in the six months before its June 2024 survey. The most common reasons were learning about a specific condition and finding out what symptoms mean.

Two cautions. That survey is now more than two years old, and ChatGPT use has grown a great deal since. And it measures health questions in general, not the choice of a provider. We have not found a reliable public figure for how many Australians use AI to pick a clinic, and we would be wary of anyone who quotes one without a source.

How often do Google AI Overviews appear for health searches?

BrightEdge has tracked healthcare keywords at the same point each December since 2023. Its December 2025 report found AI Overviews on:

• 59 per cent of healthcare keywords in December 2023
• 84 per cent in December 2024
• 89 per cent in December 2025

Within that, treatment and procedure queries reached 100 per cent and symptom and condition queries 93 per cent.

The same report found the opposite trend for local provider searches. Queries like “dermatologist near me” or “best family doctor near me” went from 100 per cent AI Overview coverage in December 2023 to 0 per cent in December 2025. Google has, for now, handed those searches back to the map pack and the local results.

For a clinic, that splits the work in two. The questions patients ask before they choose a provider, about a condition, a treatment or a cost, are now answered by AI at the top of the page. The moment they look for a provider nearby, your Google Business Profile and local listings still do the deciding. Both need attention.

Do AI answers reduce clicks?

Yes, according to the best available evidence.

• Pew Research Center analysed the browsing of US adults in March 2025. When a Google AI summary appeared, users clicked a traditional search result in 8 per cent of visits, against 15 per cent when no summary appeared. They clicked a link inside the summary in just 1 per cent of visits. In that study, 18 per cent of Google searches produced an AI summary.
• SparkToro, using Similarweb data, reported that 68 per cent of US Google searches ended without a click in the first four months of 2026.

Both are US figures. We have not seen an equivalent Australian study, but the Google product is the same here.

Where is search heading?

These are forecasts, not measurements, and they are labelled that way by the people who made them.

• Gartner predicted in February 2024 that traditional search engine volume would drop 25 per cent by 2026 as people turn to AI chatbots and virtual agents.
• In December 2023 it predicted that brands’ organic search traffic would fall by 50 per cent or more by 2028.
• Semrush projects that visitors arriving from AI search will overtake visitors from traditional search by early 2028. Across the sites it studied, it found the average AI search visitor was worth 4.4 times as much as a traditional organic visitor, based on conversion rate. That is a cross-industry figure, not a healthcare one.

What we found in Australian clinics

In July 2026 we published The State of AI Visibility for Australian Clinics, based on 25 patient-style clinic searches and audits of 50 clinic homepages. The headline findings:

• In 64 per cent of the searches, three or more of the top five results were directories, aggregators, forums or listicles rather than clinic websites.
• 94 per cent of clinic homepages had some structured data, but only 56 per cent carried a business or medical type that identifies what the clinic is.
• Only 10 per cent published FAQ structured data, and 28 per cent published a real llms.txt file.

The full method and the per-sector tables are in the report.

What should a clinic owner take from this?

Three things are well supported.

1. AI answers now sit above the links for most health questions. If your website does not answer patients’ questions clearly, the AI answer will be built from someone else’s.
2. Local provider searches still run through Google Business Profile and the map pack. Reviews, accurate hours and consistent listings remain the foundation.
3. Most Australian clinics have not yet done the basic structural work. That is an opportunity, not a guarantee. Nobody controls which practices an AI answer names.

The useful first step is to measure where your own clinic stands. A free AI visibility audit benchmarks your practice across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Gemini, shows who is named instead, and sets out what to fix first.