107 SEO Statistics for 2026

We’ve curated, vetted, and categorized a list of up-to-date stats below.

1. 68% of online experiences begin with a search engine. (BrightEdge)
2. 63.41% of all US web traffic referrals come from Google. (SparkToro)
3. SEO drives 1,000%+ more traffic than organic social media. (BrightEdge)
4. 96.55% of all pages get zero search traffic from Google. (Ahrefs)
5. 87% of marketers surveyed use AI to create or help create content (769 out of 879 respondents). (Ahrefs)
6. 87% of marketers use AI to help create content. (Ahrefs)
7. 96.55% of all pages get zero organic search traffic from Google. (Ahrefs)
8. AI Overviews are associated with a 58% lower average click-through rate for the top-ranking organic page. (Ahrefs)

1. Google holds a 90.39% global search engine market share across all devices. (StatCounter)
2. Google maintains a web index of ~400 billion documents. (Zyppy)
3. 61.5% of desktop searches and 34.4% of mobile searches result in no-clicks. (SparkToro)
4. 15% of all Google searches have never been searched before. (Google)
5. The average top-ranking result has a CTR of 9.28%, followed by 5.82 and 3.11% for positions two and three. (ResearchGate)

1. Organic CTR on queries with Google AI Overviews fell to 0.61% in September 2025, down 61% from 1.76% in June 2024. (Seer Interactive)
2. The first organic Google result has an average CTR of 39.8%. (First Page Sage)
3. 96.6% of all Google search clicks go to results on the first page of results. (Ahrefs)
4. The top 3 organic Google results receive 68.7% of all clicks on the search page. (First Page Sage)

1. Only 1.94% of all pages get between one and ten monthly search visits from Google. (Ahrefs)
2. The top-ranking page gets the most total search traffic only 49% of the time. (Ahrefs)
3. Only 1.74% of newly published pages reach the top 10 search results within one year for at least one keyword. (Ahrefs)
4. 72.9% of pages ranking in Google’s top 10 are more than 3 years old. (Ahrefs)
5. 7.4% of top-ranking pages don’t have a title tag. (Ahrefs)
6. Google changed title tags 76.04% of the time based on Q1 2025 data. (John McAlpin)
7. Google rewrites title tags 33.4% of the time, making it 33% more likely to rewrite title tags than previously measured. (Ahrefs)
8. When Google ignores the title tag, it uses H1 50.76% of the time instead. (Ahrefs)
9. Google is 57% more likely to rewrite title tags that are too long. (Ahrefs)
10. 25.02% of top-ranking pages don’t have a meta description. (Ahrefs)
11. Google rewrites meta descriptions 62.78% of the time. This drops to 59.65% for fat-head and rises to 65.62% for long-tails. (Ahrefs)
12. 40.61% of pages have meta descriptions that truncate. (Ahrefs)
13. Google shows meta descriptions in search results only 37.22% of the time. That rises to 40.35% for fat-head keywords and drops to 34.38% for long-tails. (Ahrefs)
14. The average top-ranking page also ranks in the top 10 search results for nearly 1,000 other relevant keywords. (Ahrefs)
15. There’s no correlation between Flesch Reading Ease scores and ranking positions. (Ahrefs)
16. 30.9% of featured snippets rank in position one in Google search results. (Ahrefs)
17. AI-cited content is 25.7% fresher on average than pages ranking in organic Google results. (Ahrefs)

1. There’s a positive correlation between the number of websites linking to a page and its search traffic. (Ahrefs)
2. Pages ranking higher in Google’s SERPs tend to acquire more new followed referring domains — a positive correlation found across 10,000 SERPs analyzed. (Ahrefs)
3. Most top-ranking pages get “followed” backlinks from new websites at a pace of +5%-14.5% per month. (Ahrefs)
4. 73.6% of domains have reciprocal links, meaning that some of the sites they link to also link to them. (Ahrefs)
5. 43.7% of the top-ranking pages have some reciprocal links. (Ahrefs)
6. 66.5% of links to sites in the last nine years are dead. (Ahrefs)
7. 10.6% of all backlinks to the top 110,000 sites are nofollow. (Ahrefs)
8. 0.44% of referring domains to the top 110k sites use rel=“ugc” and 0.01% use rel=“sponsored”. (Ahrefs)
9. URLs with a larger number of anchor text variations from internal links are highly correlated with more Google search traffic. (Zyppy)
10. Pages with at least one exact match anchor had at least five times more traffic than pages without. (Zyppy)
11. SEOs typically take 1-2 hours to build a single link. (Aira)
12. Top-ranking pages (#1 position) tend to gain followed backlinks from new referring domains at a pace of between +5% and +14.5% per month. (Ahrefs)

1. 94.74% of keywords get 10 monthly searches or fewer. (Ahrefs)
2. 0.0008% of keywords get more than 100,000 monthly searches. (Ahrefs)
3. Google Ads Keyword Planner overestimates search volumes 54.28% of the time and is roughly accurate 45.22% of the time. (Ahrefs)
4. 46.08% of clicks in Google Search Console go to hidden terms. (Ahrefs)

1. 78.2% of SEOs charge monthly retainers for some or all of their services. (Ahrefs)
2. 54.5% of SEOs only offer one pricing model (hourly, retainer, or per-project). (Ahrefs)
3. $501–$1,000 per month is the most popular monthly retainer rate for SEOs, with 20.4% of respondents charging this rate. (Ahrefs)
4. 24% of SEOs charge $75–$100 per hour, making it the most popular hourly rate. (Ahrefs)
5. 21.2% of respondents charge $2,501–$5,000 per project, making it the most popular per-project SEO rate. (Ahrefs)
6. Only 4.1% of SEO professionals charge $201 or more per hour. (Ahrefs)
7. Agencies and consultants usually charge more than freelancers. (Ahrefs)
8. SEOs serving a local market charge $1,557.08/month on average, while those serving the worldwide market charge $3,473.74/month on average — 123.1% more. (Ahrefs)
9. There’s a clear positive correlation between experience and rates. (Ahrefs)
10. 85.7% of India-based SEOs charge $30 or less per hour for their services. (Ahrefs)
11. The median annual salary for SEOs in 2023 was $49,211, rising to $58,288 in 2024. (Ahrefs)
12. To earn higher salaries in SEO, you need to be a technical SEO expert. Heads of SEO, SEO Directors, and SEO Leads all said that their main specialization was technical SEO. (Ahrefs)
13. Self-employed SEOs earned the most on average ($60,232). The median annual salary for in-house roles was slightly lower at $56,789, and agency SEOs had the lowest median annual salary at $44,169. (Ahrefs)
14. SEO Directors have an average of 13 years of experience, while Heads of SEO average 10 years of experience. (Ahrefs)
15. Google rewrites title tags 33.4% of the time. (Ahrefs)
16. Only 5.7% of newly published pages will rank in Google’s top 10 search results within a year of publication. (Ahrefs)

1. 33% of websites pass the Core Web Vitals threshold. (Ahrefs)
2. Only 11.9% of pages had at least one Core Web Vitals metric, and 93% of those had all three metrics. (Ahrefs)
3. Over 67% of domains using Hreflang have issues. (Ahrefs)
4. 95.2% of sites have 3XX redirect issues. (Ahrefs)
5. 88% of sites have HTTP to HTTPS redirect issues. (Ahrefs)
6. 53.1% of home pages have missing alternative text for images. (WebAIM Million)
7. 72.3% of sites have slow pages. (Ahrefs)
8. 68.5% of sites have page and SERP titles that do not match. (Ahrefs)
9. 66.2% of sites have a page that has only one follow incoming internal link. (Ahrefs)
10. 62.7% of sites have a page that links to redirects. (Ahrefs)
11. 59.5% of sites have missing H1 tags. (Ahrefs)
12. 51.3% of sites have multiple H1 tags. (Ahrefs)
13. 95.2% of websites have 3XX redirect issues. (Ahrefs)
14. 80.4% of websites have missing alt attributes. (Ahrefs)
15. 72.3% of websites have slow pages. (Ahrefs)

1. 58% of companies don’t optimize for local search. (ReviewTrackers)
2. 80% of consumers say they’re likely to use a business that responds to all of its reviews. (BrightLocal)
3. Customers are 2.7 times more likely to consider a business reputable if they find a complete Business Profile on Google Search and Maps. (Google)
4. Customers are 70% more likely to visit and 50% more likely to consider purchasing from businesses with a complete Business Profile. (Google)
5. Google Business Profile signals account for 32% of local pack ranking influence, making it the most important ranking factor category for the map pack. (Whitespark)
6. 36% of SEOs think on-page is the most important ranking factor for local organic search results. (BrightLocal)
7. 76% of people who search on their smartphones for something nearby visit a business within a day. (Google)
8. 28% of searches for something nearby result in a purchase. (Google)

1. 91% of businesses use video as a marketing tool. (Wyzowl)
2. 93% of video marketers see video as an important part of their overall strategy. (Wyzowl)
3. 63% of video marketers have used AI video tools to help create or edit marketing videos. (Wyzowl)
4. 85% of people say they’ve been convinced to buy a product or service by watching a brand’s video. (Wyzowl)

1. Mobile accounts for 51.04% of global platform market share as of May 2026. (StatCounter)
2. 51% of smartphone users have discovered a new company or product when conducting a search on their smartphones. (Google)
3. 56% of in-store shoppers used their smartphones to shop or research items while they were in-store. (Google)

1. 65% of respondents said human-written content is better quality than AI-generated content, while 14% said AI content was better and 21% said the two were roughly the same. (Ahrefs)
2. 71% of marketers use AI tools for content ideation. (HubSpot)
3. 48% of the most widely used news websites across ten countries were blocking OpenAI’s crawlers. 24% were blocking Google’s AI crawler. (Reuters Institute)
4. Since the release of ChatGPT, there has been a 33% decrease in writing jobs. (Bloomberry)
5. AI Overviews are associated with a 34.5% reduction in clicks for pages that rank in search results. (Ahrefs)
6. Google sends 345 times more traffic than ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity combined. (Ahrefs)
7. 74% of all new web content published contains AI-generated content. (Ahrefs)
8. YouTube accounts for ~23.3% of citations across Google AI Overviews, making it the most-cited domain overall, based on an analysis of 36 million AI Overviews and 46 million citations. (Surfer)
9. Wikipedia appears in ~18.4% of Google AI Overview citations, making it the second most-cited domain overall across nearly every industry. (Surfer)
10. ChatGPT accounts for 77.97% of all AI referral traffic globally, making it the dominant AI platform for website referrals. (SE Ranking)
11. Perplexity drives 15.10% of all AI referral traffic to websites globally. (SE Ranking)