Study: How American Consumers Are Using AI

3 months ago 2

AI is here, or at least Large Language Model based versions of AI, and it appears to be here to stay. We wanted to understand more deeply how American consumers are using AI, how they feel about AI systems, and use this data to forecast how it might impact the greater web. We recently polled 1,151 adult (18 and over) American residents on how they use AI systems and the information they shared with us is eye opening about the current realities of and future of the internet.

How Often AI is Being Used

One of the most important questions is how often consumers are using these LLM-AI systems since most of the data coming from them and surrounding them is dark or otherwise untraceable, asking consumers directly should help us better understand the role these systems play in day to day lives.

75.16% of American consumers have used an AI system in the past six months at least one time.

17.12% of consumers say they are using an AI system multiple times per day and 15.90% say they are using an AI system of some kind at least once per day. We refer to this group as “Heavy AI Users” and they make up just slightly under 1/3rd of all consumers at 33.02%.

20.59% of consumers say they are using an AI system at least once per week, 11.12% say they are using AI at least once per month, and 10.43% say they use AI at least once every 6 months. We refer to this group of consumers as “Casual Users” and they make up the largest group of current American consumers currently at 42.14%.

8.34% of consumers say they use an AI system once a year or less and 16.50% say they never use AI. We refer to this group of consumers as “AI Haters” and they make up the smallest cohort but one of the more vocal ones, at 24.84%.

It’s safe to say that we are currently witnessing something extremely close to a classic Rogers Bell Curve though the back side of the curve is a little malformed. Rogers Bell Curves are typically used to show diffusion of technology into the market, but here we see it doing a decent job of representing frequency of usage of AI technology 2.5 years into the craze.

Insight: While nearly 1/3rd of Americans are using AI daily, most are still not using AI that frequently. This likely means appearance in search engines is utterly critical while also working to ensure inclusion in AI systems. Only time will tell if this number of heavy users grows like search did before it and how that will shape the web.

What AI Systems Consumers Say they are Using

Now that we now for most Americans AI is either a growing curiosity or something they use with a high frequency, we want to understand which AI platforms they are using or at least believe they are using. Consumers were asked to select any AI system they used in the past 6-months. We didn’t examine frequency of usage here just self-reported usage at least once in the past 6 months of time.

The most used LLM-AI system chat or otherwise over the past 6 months is ChatGPT with 46.13% of the population declaring they used it. Google’s Gemini system comes in second place for usage at 22.76% and Meta’s AI system on Facebook comes into third place at 19.29% of people using it. Rounding out the top five are Google’s AI Overviews in Search with 18.94% of the population saying they’ve used them and Microsoft Copilot at 15.81%.

Google’s AI Mode, only a test for most of our study duration, clocked in at an astounding 14.68% of the population claiming to use it.

Google has 3 of the top 6 most used AI systems / functions / features according to our study and their only real competition at the top are Meta, Microsoft, and ChatGPT.
Meta has 3 of the top 20 most used AI systems.
Microsoft has 2 of the top 20 most used AI systems.
X / Xai has 1 of the top 10 most used AI systems.

Apple, Amazon, and other tech companies all fall well short of where you might assume they would rank. In fact our AI writing platform WriteAI was cited by more of our survey respondents than Midjourney, Windsurf, Jasper, Github Copilot, Apple Intelligence, and GoDaddy Airo.

ChatGPT – 46.13%
Google Gemini – 22.76%
Meta AI on Facebook – 19.29%
Google AI Overviews – 18.94%
Microsoft Copilot – 15.81%
Google AI Mode – 14.68%
DeepSeek – 8.60%
FaceApp – 8.51%
Grok on X – 8.34%
Perplexity – 7.38%
Character.ai – 7.12%
Meta AI Studio on Instagram – 6.60%
iAsk AI – 5.99%
Claude by Anthropic – 5.82%
WriteAI – 5.65%
Questions AI – 5.56%
ChatOn – 5.47%
Meta’s Llama – 5.30%
Github Copilot – 5.30%
In Video – 4.95%
Midjourney – 4.60%
Talkie – 4.60%
HuggingFace – 4.43%
Jasper – 4.26%
Cursor – 4.00%
Icon – 4.00%
Kling – 3.91%
MindRoomAI – 3.74%
Linky – 3.39%
Windsurf – 3.13%
Apple Intelligence – 0.08%
GoDaddy Airo – 0.08%
Snapchat AI – 0.08%

Insight: Diffusion of AI systems throughout the American population has been rapid with 75.16% of Americans using AI at least once in the six-months prior to our study. This means there is likely little room for onboarding new customers to an AI system as consumers try and decide whether to keep using an AI system or not fairly quickly. There are also so many AI systems now consumers are likely uncertain which one they are using, especially if there’s more than one with a similar function or sounding name and if the user only uses that platform infrequently, or if a major tech company is rolling out multiple AI offerings (Google and Meta). Our best guess here is that our WriteAI ranked so highly due to this confusion, consumers who use an AI system from time to time to write content might have forgotten the name and just selected our platform which in reality gets lower usage than you might expect from these results. We expect to see some consolidation here in the near future for all-in-one AI apps as well as one-off purpose built AI apps arising to challenge incumbents. As long as the investor capital is flowing, the surge in number of platforms will only increase leading to more consumer confusion. Future apps should have extremely unique names and a specific set of tasks or focus.

What Consumers Use AI for

One of our core missions for this study was to determine specific ways which American consumers are using AI. Since we do not have access to the locked down data that the big AI companies have, we needed to ask this from our respondents and decided to give them several specific options to help us better understand what they are using AI for exactly.

The single most cited usage for AI is something most will be familiar with and the likely reason Google is torching their vaunted engine to the ground in favor of generative AI – Search. 29.28% of Americans said they are using an AI system to simply search the web, something we had already nearly perfected prior to AI’s emergence as a chat system. Beyond search Americans are using AI to, Learn something new (24.76%), Fix grammar and spelling (19.80%), Generate new ideas (19.64%), Be a source of personal entertainment [undefined] (16.59%), Explore or understand a concept more in-depth (15.12%), Get help with work or personal goals (13.90%), Get help with cooking (13.81%).

Search the web – 29.28%
Learn something new – 24.76%
Fix my grammar usage / spelling automatically – 19.8%
Generate new ideas – 19.64%
Personal entertainment – 16.59%
Explore / Understand concepts in-depth – 15.12%
Help achieving goals (work or personal) – 13.90%
Help with cooking – 13.81%
Other work related use – 13.03%
Help with online shopping – 12.86%
General chatting – 12.42%
Help with fitness / health / nutrition – 10.51%
Create content for my job – 10.08%
Solve a medical problem – 9.64%
Automate some or all of my work – 9.56%
Get support from a website or business – 9.47%
Attempt to improve job prospects (resume, etc..) – 9.12%
Translate my content or content of others – 9.04%
Solve a financial problem – 8.60%
Write / fix code or develop apps – 7.47%
Help with investing or other money management – 7.38%
Make new video content for social media – 7.38%
Make new headshot photos for social media – 7.30%
Find a new local business – 7.21%
Make memes – 7.12%
Therapy – 6.43%
Solve a legal problem – 6.26%
Make photo content for serious use cases – 5.91%
Make video content to monetize – 5.73%
Help with buying a car / truck / other automotive – 5.73%
Get relationship advice – 5.56%
Indulge in a fantasy – 5.47%
Find a new online business – 5.13%
Create content to sell to others – 5.13%
Make video content for serious video production – 4.87%
Help with buying real estate – 4.69%
Trying or successfully working more than one full-time job – 4.43%
Solve a relationship problem – 4.34%
Scrape / duplicate web content – 4.34%
Create rankings – 4.34%
Cheat on homework / exams – 4.17%
Get help flirting / hitting on / picking up others – 4.00%
Catfish / Troll / Prank others – 3.30%

Insight: AI hasn’t rendered search useless, in fact it seems AI systems depend on the web far more than might have been previously assumed. It is imperative to the survival of AI systems that they find a way to work with the open web or risk losing access to the immense depth and detail of information it provides forever either due to being blocked or due to websites closing down.

Our study took a closer look at specific habits and uses of AI versus incumbents such as search engines. Here we see where consumers start to define differences between traditional search and AI. ChatGPT leads the field with 26.32% of Americans so they prefer this method for finding new products to purchase. Google’s search engine comes in a surprising second place with 23.11%.

ChatGPT Chat – 26.32%
Google’s Search Engine (including Google Shopping) – 23.11%
Google’s AI Mode / Gemini – 14.25%
Google’s AI Overviews – 13.03%
Bing / Microsoft’s Copilot Chat – 4.78%
Bing’s Search Engine – 4.52%
Perplexity – 3.39%

ChatGPT’s lead only grows when we examine this data but only for our group of Heavy AI Users. While Google holds on to overall dominance, the single most popular way Americans find a new product right now is via ChatGPT’s chat system.

ChatGPT Chat – 29.21%
Google’s Search Engine (including Google Shopping) – 21.58%
Google’s AI Mode / Gemini – 19.74%
Google’s AI Overviews – 12.89%
Bing / Microsoft’s Copilot Chat – 6.32%
Perplexity – 4.21%
Bing’s Search Engine – 3.68%

Insight: Likely surprising to many, this makes sense when you realize Google purposefully made their ecommerce search worse in order to drive more ad clicks. In many cases it is easier to find what you need via ChatGPT and a series of questions than by searching on Google multiple times. DTC and other ecommerce merchants should be paying attention to this trend since ChatGPT offers little in the way of data or analytics. For example: consider surveying your own customers on their usage of ChatGPT or other AI systems and try to discover the prompts they use if possible.

AI vs. Search for Information

We took a closer look at how consumers self-report using either AI or search to find new information. To our knowledge this is the first published attempt at comparing LLM-based AI and more traditional search engines for this kind of consumer behavior. Here ChatGPT barely edges out Google’s search engine and once we take into account margin of error you could say the two are currently neck and neck. Google takes an all over win here with 47.79% of total usage between Search, AI Overviews, and AI Mode / Gemini.

ChatGPT Chat – 27.54%
Google’s Search Engine – 26.24%
Google’s AI Mode / Gemini – 12.08%
Google’s AI Overviews – 9.47%
Bing / Microsoft’s Copilot Chat – 5.99%
Bing’s Search Engine – 5.21%
Perplexity – 3.74%

ChatGPT Chat – 36.84%
Google’s Search Engine – 18.68%
Google’s AI Mode / Gemini – 14.47%
Google’s AI Overviews – 10.79%
Bing / Microsoft’s Copilot Chat – 6.58%
Bing’s Search Engine – 5.53%
Perplexity – 4.74%
Grok – 1.05%

Insight: As many publishers feared, AI appears to be eating their traffic by taking their content and rewriting for around 1/3rd of consumers or more. Publishers who escaped the scythe of the HCU and haven’t lost much traffic to ChatGPT should consider themselves lucky. We expect publishers to fight back with subscriber-only LLM-chat systems or other such systems to recommend content on their site to subscribers and readers.

AI vs. Search for Local Businesses

Local businesses are the heartbeat of American communities with most thriving or dyeing based on how Google decides to rank them in Google Maps, allow spammers, or include the map/finder pack in regular search results or not. We wanted to better understand how AI usage might impact these local businesses. Here we see that AI systems, most notably ChatGPT, are struggling to beat Google’s search engine. Google Search which we told respondents included Google Maps, took 31.54% of all usage as the number one way consumers self-reported finding a local business. ChatGPT came in second at 21.89%, a much larger piece of the pie than expected, and Google’s Gemini or AI Mode came in third with 10.95% of consumers reporting to use these tools to find a new local business.

Google’s Search Engine (including Google Maps) – 31.54%
ChatGPT Chat – 21.89%
Google’s AI Mode / Gemini – 10.95%
Google’s AI Overviews – 10.17%
Bing / Microsoft’s Copilot Chat – 6.08%
Bing’s Search Engine (including Bing Places) – 5.04%
Perplexity – 4.34%

Google’s Search Engine (including Google Maps) – 29.73%
ChatGPT Chat – 27.11%
Google’s AI Mode / Gemini – 12.63%
Google’s AI Overviews – 8.42%
Bing / Microsoft’s Copilot Chat – 8.68%
Bing’s Search Engine (including Bing Places) – 5.26%
Perplexity – 5.53%
Perplexity – 0.78%

Insight: AI hasn’t been great at local search even as Google allows spam listings to pollute Google Maps, ChatGPT often recommends businesses hundreds of miles away. This shows where Google is currently the strongest though heavy AI users show Google’s grip on local search slipping. It is imperative that all local businesses now have an LLM optimization plan in place.

Is AI Improving Search on the Web or Making it Worse?

With nearly 30% of Americans saying they use AI systems to search the web – the #1 way American consumers currently use AI systems – is this a better experience or a worse one? Search on Google pre-LLM was fast, efficient, and simple – unless of course Google showed you spam, a page covered in ads, itself was covered in ads, or simply couldn’t find the right document to answer your question. Would consumers when asked believe that search today is now improved over the issues of prior years thanks to the introduction of generative AI / LLM-powered systems?

It would seem Americans overwhelmingly think AI has made searching the web a better experience, though not a majority of Americans.

Better – 40.83%
No Change – 34.67%
Worse – 24.50%

When we examine our Heavy AI Users breakout group this changes and a majority here believe AI has improved web searching.

Better – 57.36%
No Change – 22.11%
Worse – 20.53%

Insight: A complete shocker to us. AI has made search in many ways quite worse. Searches that used to take seconds to perform can now take several minutes or even an hour at extremes talking back and forth with a chat AI. We anticipated users, especially considering the low volume of heavy AI users, to state search was Worse or that No Change at the least would prevail in our general population view. However, even users who barely use AI seem to think it has improved their search experience. Is this impact being caused by Google’s AI overviews or how productive you seem to feel after a ChatGPT chat sessions? We are not certain, the fact remains though that most Americans consider AI to be a way to improve their search experience in some capacity.

What Brand Represents the Highest Quality

Another way consumers decide mentally to use a platform for discovering new information, products, or local businesses is to first believe that brand represents the highest quality source of information available. We asked our American survey respondents a simple question “Which of the following brands do you believe represents the highest quality source of information?” and asked them to select the single brand that fit best. Here we only gave consumers a small selection of brands to choose from leaving out platforms like Grok, Meta AI, and Microsoft Copilot focusing on the biggest names in Search and AI at the time the study was conducted.

Google wins here with nearly 50% of the American population considering them to be the brand the represents the highest quality information out of the selected brands provided.

Google – 48.39%
ChatGPT – 26.15%
Siri – 7.99%
Bing – 5.99%
DeepSeek – 4.52%
Perplexity – 3.56%
Claude – 3.39%

When we examine our group of Heavy AI Users Google’s lead drops nearly 8 points and ChatGPT’s grows nearly 10 points. The two lead the field with Apple’s Siri an extremely distant third-place at 5.53% and Claude from Anthropic again in last place at 3.68%

Google – 40.62%
ChatGPT – 35.26%
Siri – 5.53%
Perplexity – 5.26%
Bing – 5.26%
DeepSeek – 4.74%
Claude – 3.68%

One interesting way of examining the quality dataset is to compare it with the respondents answers about how often they use AI. When we do this an extremely clear pattern emerges of Google being less frequently considered the highest quality brand and ChatGPT increasing in this category. To put it more simply, the more you use an AI system the lower quality you likely consider Google’s brand to be. A major cause of concern for the tech giant.

Insight: For a long time Google has been considered one of the highest quality sources of information in human history. This leads to complete trust in their system such as the meme that goes something like “Did it hurt when you Googled it and I was right?” They have enjoyed this position in the minds of American consumers for over 2 decades, but now seem to have competition in the form of ChatGPT. Can the upstart which is backed by Microsoft grow enough to take on Google? Will Google completely rebuild their search engine to be the dominate AI system and put OpenAI out of business? This remains to be seen, but in the minds of consumers when it comes to quality this is a two-horse race right now and the longer consumers use any AI system the less they think of Google in terms of being the highest quality brand.

Methodology

We surveyed 1,151 adult Americans of varying ages, financial status, and marital status using the Survey Monkey platform. Our respondents came from various pools including posts on X, a handful of Facebook Groups, the r/SampleSize subreddit, and the Survey Monkey audience system. We worked to ensure inclusion of Americans from all backgrounds across the country and weeded out respondents who were not located in the United States of America at the time they took the survey. At no time were respondents aware that this study was being performed by an SEO agency or were in any way exposed to the potential uses of this study. Questions were presented without bias and the order of potential responses was randomized to avoid bias when respondents answered questions. We evaluated various criteria and removed some responses we felt were low quality.

The study has 2.83% margin of error at a 95% confidence interval