Almost four in ten Google searches on US desktop computers returned an AI Overview in June. That figure, 39.4%, comes from Comscore’s second-quarter 2026 AI Intelligence Report, and it sits well above the 25.8% share the same panel recorded in July 2025. The more useful number in the report is not the overview total. It is the gap Comscore documents between sites that feed an AI answer and sites that actually receive a visible citation for it.
Bing’s Copilot Search experience followed a similar curve on desktop, appearing in 17.3% of searches in June versus 11.8% the previous July. Comscore measured presence, not performance: the report tracked how often these AI experiences showed up, not the clicks or traffic they generated. Desktop search volume itself kept climbing through the same period. Comscore counted 77 billion US desktop searches in Q2 2026, an 8% increase over the 71 billion recorded in Q2 2024.
YouTube led as the most-cited domain in Google and Bing AI results for entertainment, retail and financial services queries in June; Wikipedia topped the sports category. Reddit placed near the top across all four verticals Comscore tracked, ranking third in entertainment and retail and fifth in sports. In retail citations specifically, YouTube appeared in 23% of top-listed sources, trailed by Amazon (14%), Reddit (12%) and Wikipedia (11%). The financial services breakdown was flatter: YouTube took 9% of citations, and NerdWallet, Reddit and Bankrate each held 7%.
The report’s sharpest finding involves lodging searches, where Comscore separated “source” presence from “citation” presence for the first time in this level of detail. Between December 2025 and May 2026, tracking US PC activity, Tripadvisor showed up as a source behind 61% of lodging-related AI answers, yet it surfaced as a clickable citation in just 21% of them. Hotels.com followed a similar pattern: 50% source presence against 18% citation presence. Expedia’s figures ran 46% and 16% respectively, and Booking.com’s ran 33% and 9%. A site can shape what an AI system tells a searcher without that searcher ever seeing the site’s name or link.
That distinction matters more than the overview percentage itself. A publisher measuring “AI visibility” by citation counts alone may be missing the larger share of influence happening upstream, in the training and retrieval layer the assistant draws from before it decides what to display. Comscore’s data suggests source inclusion and citation credit should be tracked as two separate metrics, not one.
Assistant competition also shifted through the first half of 2026. ChatGPT held about 50% of AI prompt volume in June, down from 70% in January. Gemini rose from 17% to 30% over the same stretch, and Claude grew from 2% to 11%; Copilot held steady at 5%. Assistant reach, a separate measure covering both desktop and mobile use rather than search results specifically, hit 35% on desktop and 29% on mobile by June, compared with 25% and 12% respectively back in January 2025.
Every figure above describing AI Overview and Copilot Search prevalence applies to US desktop activity only; Comscore’s report does not claim these shares hold on mobile or outside the United States. Sites that rank well in classic results but rarely appear as named sources in Comscore’s citation breakdowns should treat that absence as a separate diagnostic from ranking position, and pull their own logs for AI referral patterns before assuming a listicle or forum thread instead of their page is now doing that work for them.
Search Engine Land, reporting September 22, 2026, on Comscore’s Q2 2026 AI Intelligence Report.
