For most of the last twenty years, getting found meant one thing: ranking on Google. Google is still where most searches happen, but what happens after the search has changed a lot, and a second front door has opened next to it. Here's what the data says about how people find apps now, and what to do about it.
Google is still the biggest door, but fewer people walk through it
Google handles roughly nine in ten searches worldwide, according to StatCounter. What's changed is how often a search ends with a visit to someone's website.
- Most searches end on Google. In the US, 68.01% of Google searches in January to April 2026 ended without a click to any website, up from 60.45% in 2024, according to SparkToro's study of Similarweb data.
- AI summaries take the click. The same study found AI Overviews on more than 20% of searches, and click-through rates drop by nearly 60% when one appears.
- People rarely click the sources. Pew Research tracked 900 US adults and found they clicked a regular search result in 8% of visits with an AI summary, versus 15% without one. They clicked a link inside the summary in just 1% of visits, and ended their browsing session more often (26% vs 16%) (Pew Research Center).
Ranking still matters. It just pays out less traffic than it used to, especially for "best app for X" questions that an AI summary can answer on the spot.
The second door: AI assistants
ChatGPT had more than 900 million weekly users in February 2026, up from 500 million in March 2025 (Search Engine Land). Google says its own AI Mode passed 1 billion monthly users, as reported in the same SparkToro coverage.
Back in 2024, Gartner predicted that traditional search volume would drop 25% by 2026 as people moved to AI chatbots. Google's market share hasn't collapsed, but the direction was right: more questions now get answered by an AI, and the answer names a few apps instead of listing ten links.
That changes the game for app makers. On a results page you can be result number seven and still get some clicks. In an AI answer, you're either one of the three names or you're invisible.
What AI answers are built from
AI answers don't come from nowhere. Pew found that Wikipedia, YouTube and Reddit were the most cited sources in Google's AI summaries, together making up 15% of all cited sources. In other words, the pages that shape an answer are mostly pages you don't own: forum threads, videos, review sites and "best of" lists.
This is why a great app with a great homepage can still be invisible. If nobody else writes about it, there's little for an assistant to find and repeat.
What this means for your app
- Measure more than rankings. Check whether AI assistants name your app when someone asks for an app like yours. You can do it by hand, or run a free AI visibility check.
- Get onto the pages answers are built from. "Best X" roundups, comparison articles, Reddit threads, YouTube reviews and app directories. One honest mention on a page that ranks is worth more than a new blog post on your own site.
- Say clearly what your app is. Assistants describe you using what they can read. One plain sentence on your homepage ("X is a [category] for [who] that [does what]") makes it easy to repeat correctly.
- Expect fewer, better visits. AI-referred visitors arrive having already shortlisted you. In US retail, traffic from generative AI tools grew 693.4% year over year in the 2025 holiday season and converted 31% better than other traffic (Adobe). That's retail, not apps, but the pattern is worth watching in your own analytics.
Next: why your app isn't getting users, and how to tell a product problem from a discovery problem.
