56 sourced statistics
Most AI visibility claims skip the denominator, so this sourcebook keeps it attached. 31 figures come from a read-only pull of Cheers production covering 119 home-services organizations and 2,671,846 prompt checks; the other 25 come from 7 public studies we opened and read.
Use these to set a baseline, not to promise an outcome. Product usage, consumer habits, and model answers all move faster than a quarterly refresh.
56
numbered statistics
31
Cheers panel figures
25
figures from 7 public sources
Cheers panel
Every figure in this section came out of the production pull run on September 3, 2026 at 04:05 UTC, covering the 28 days ending September 2, 2026. Nothing here is derived arithmetic; each one is checked against the results file when the site builds.
119 home-services organizations had AI prompt tracking running in the 28 days ending September 2, 2026.
Cheers-owned and market-baseline organizations are excluded from every customer panel cut.
Source: Cheers production panel pull. Published 2026-09-02. Checked 2026-09-02. Methodology
The home-services panel recorded 2,671,846 individual prompt checks in that 28-day window.
Source: Cheers production panel pull. Published 2026-09-02. Checked 2026-09-02. Methodology
The mean AI appearance rate across the home-services panel was 27.0 percent.
Each organization is measured once, then averaged, so a large location network cannot stand in for the panel.
Source: Cheers production panel pull. Published 2026-09-02. Checked 2026-09-02. Methodology
The 25th-percentile home-services organization appeared in 15.1 percent of its checks.
Source: Cheers production panel pull. Published 2026-09-02. Checked 2026-09-02. Methodology
The median home-services organization appeared in 27.4 percent of its checks.
Source: Cheers production panel pull. Published 2026-09-02. Checked 2026-09-02. Methodology
The 75th-percentile home-services organization appeared in 37.3 percent of its checks.
Source: Cheers production panel pull. Published 2026-09-02. Checked 2026-09-02. Methodology
The 90th-percentile home-services organization appeared in 47.4 percent of its checks.
Source: Cheers production panel pull. Published 2026-09-02. Checked 2026-09-02. Methodology
The mean citation rate across the home-services panel was 22.0 percent.
Appearance means the answer named the business. Citation means the answer linked a source attributed to it.
Source: Cheers production panel pull. Published 2026-09-02. Checked 2026-09-02. Methodology
0.8 percent of home-services organizations never appeared once during the window.
Source: Cheers production panel pull. Published 2026-09-02. Checked 2026-09-02. Methodology
The median real-estate organization appeared in 61.5 percent of its checks, across 56 organizations.
Source: Cheers production panel pull. Published 2026-09-02. Checked 2026-09-02. Methodology
The median beauty and personal care organization appeared in 56.4 percent of its checks, across 47 organizations.
Source: Cheers production panel pull. Published 2026-09-02. Checked 2026-09-02. Methodology
Plumbing organizations averaged a 23.6 percent appearance rate across 54 organizations.
Source: Cheers production panel pull. Published 2026-09-02. Checked 2026-09-02. Methodology
HVAC organizations averaged a 24.2 percent appearance rate across 52 organizations.
Source: Cheers production panel pull. Published 2026-09-02. Checked 2026-09-02. Methodology
Solar installation organizations averaged a 34.7 percent appearance rate across 47 organizations, the highest of the four published trades.
Source: Cheers production panel pull. Published 2026-09-02. Checked 2026-09-02. Methodology
Electrical organizations averaged a 23.9 percent appearance rate across 21 organizations.
Source: Cheers production panel pull. Published 2026-09-02. Checked 2026-09-02. Methodology
Google AI Overviews and AI Mode produced the highest mean organization appearance rate of the four engines at 31.6 percent.
Source: Cheers production panel pull. Published 2026-09-02. Checked 2026-09-02. Methodology
Perplexity produced the highest mean organization citation rate of the four engines at 34.3 percent.
Source: Cheers production panel pull. Published 2026-09-02. Checked 2026-09-02. Methodology
Perplexity also produced the lowest pooled appearance rate of the four engines at 20.4 percent.
Perplexity cites the most and shows businesses the least, which is why one engine average hides the trade-off.
Source: Cheers production panel pull. Published 2026-09-02. Checked 2026-09-02. Methodology
When ChatGPT named a tracked home-services organization, the average mention position was 2.87.
Source: Cheers production panel pull. Published 2026-09-02. Checked 2026-09-02. Methodology
Price and cost prompts produced a 37.9 percent pooled appearance rate in home services, the highest of any published prompt shape.
Source: Cheers production panel pull. Published 2026-09-02. Checked 2026-09-02. Methodology
Best near me and named-place prompts produced a 22.8 percent pooled appearance rate, the lowest of any published prompt shape.
Source: Cheers production panel pull. Published 2026-09-02. Checked 2026-09-02. Methodology
Best or top list prompts without a place name carried 2,209 of the tracked home-services prompts, more than every other shape combined.
Source: Cheers production panel pull. Published 2026-09-02. Checked 2026-09-02. Methodology
The median home-services organization collected 6.0 new reviews a month over the 90 days ending September 2, 2026.
Source: Cheers production review pull. Published 2026-09-02. Checked 2026-09-02. Methodology
The 90th-percentile home-services organization collected 46.7 new reviews a month over the same 90 days.
Source: Cheers production review pull. Published 2026-09-02. Checked 2026-09-02. Methodology
Home-services organizations answered 81.9 percent of the reviews they received in that 90-day window.
Source: Cheers production review pull. Published 2026-09-02. Checked 2026-09-02. Methodology
The mean home-services organization rating was 3.96, against 4.77 in beauty and personal care.
Source: Cheers production review pull. Published 2026-09-02. Checked 2026-09-02. Methodology
97.9 percent of the reviews home-services organizations received in the window came from Google.
Source: Cheers production review pull. Published 2026-09-02. Checked 2026-09-02. Methodology
The Cheers Market Baseline recorded 356,019 citations across 100 metros and four engines in 28 days.
The baseline is a Cheers-owned organization built to sample what engines cite. It is not a customer and its own appearance rate is not published.
Source: Cheers Market Baseline citation pull. Published 2026-09-02. Checked 2026-09-02. Methodology
ChatGPT sent 44.7 percent of its home-services citations to directories and review platforms.
Source: Cheers Market Baseline citation pull. Published 2026-09-02. Checked 2026-09-02. Methodology
Google AI surfaces sent 11.4 percent of their home-services citations to Google's own pages.
Source: Cheers Market Baseline citation pull. Published 2026-09-02. Checked 2026-09-02. Methodology
Across all four engines, 68.1 percent of home-services citations went to business websites.
Source: Cheers Market Baseline citation pull. Published 2026-09-02. Checked 2026-09-02. Methodology
Adoption
Usage figures come from Google and OpenAI's published records.
Google reported more than 2.5 billion monthly active users for AI Overviews in June 2026.
Source: New controls for website owners in AI search. Published 2026-06-03. Checked 2026-09-02. Methodology
Google reported more than 1 billion monthly AI Mode users in June 2026.
Source: New controls for website owners in AI search. Published 2026-06-03. Checked 2026-09-02. Methodology
OpenAI reported more than 700 million weekly ChatGPT users by July 2025.
Source: How People Use ChatGPT. Published 2025-09-15. Checked 2026-09-02. Methodology
ChatGPT users sent more than 2.5 billion messages per day by July 2025, according to OpenAI.
Source: How People Use ChatGPT. Published 2025-09-15. Checked 2026-09-02. Methodology
About 70 percent of consumer ChatGPT messages were unrelated to work by June 2025.
Source: How People Use ChatGPT. Published 2025-09-15. Checked 2026-09-02. Methodology
Asking for information or advice accounted for 49 percent of consumer ChatGPT messages in OpenAI's study.
Source: How People Use ChatGPT. Published 2025-09-15. Checked 2026-09-02. Methodology
Writing tasks accounted for 42 percent of work-related ChatGPT messages in OpenAI's study.
Source: How People Use ChatGPT. Published 2025-09-15. Checked 2026-09-02. Methodology
Engines
These figures describe search-result behavior, source patterns, engine overlap, and results from academic testing.
Pew found an AI summary on 18 percent of the Google searches in its March 2025 browsing dataset.
Source: Google users are less likely to click when an AI summary appears. Published 2025-07-22. Checked 2026-09-02. Methodology
Google users clicked a traditional result in 8 percent of visits with an AI summary versus 15 percent without one in Pew's study.
Source: Google users are less likely to click when an AI summary appears. Published 2025-07-22. Checked 2026-09-02. Methodology
Users clicked a source link inside a Google AI summary in 1 percent of visits measured by Pew.
Source: Google users are less likely to click when an AI summary appears. Published 2025-07-22. Checked 2026-09-02. Methodology
Search sessions ended after 26 percent of pages with an AI summary versus 16 percent of pages without one in Pew's study.
Source: Google users are less likely to click when an AI summary appears. Published 2025-07-22. Checked 2026-09-02. Methodology
88 percent of the Google AI summaries studied by Pew cited at least three sources.
Source: Google users are less likely to click when an AI summary appears. Published 2025-07-22. Checked 2026-09-02. Methodology
The median Google AI summary in Pew's dataset was 67 words long.
Source: Google users are less likely to click when an AI summary appears. Published 2025-07-22. Checked 2026-09-02. Methodology
AI summaries appeared for 53 percent of Google queries with 10 words or more in Pew's dataset.
Source: Google users are less likely to click when an AI summary appears. Published 2025-07-22. Checked 2026-09-02. Methodology
AI summaries appeared for 8 percent of one-word or two-word Google queries in Pew's dataset.
Source: Google users are less likely to click when an AI summary appears. Published 2025-07-22. Checked 2026-09-02. Methodology
82.6 percent of cited real-estate agents in Local Falcon's study appeared on only one AI platform.
Source: The Realtor AI Visibility Index. Published 2026-08-18. Checked 2026-09-02. Methodology
The GEO research paper reported visibility gains of up to 40 percent from tested content changes across 10,000 queries.
Source: GEO: Generative Engine Optimization. Published 2023-11-16. Checked 2026-09-02. Methodology
Local behavior
These studies look at local business discovery and whether the same business appears across engines and cities.
The U.S. Small Business Administration counted 36 million small businesses, or 99 percent of U.S. businesses, in fiscal year 2025.
Source: SBA 2025 Annual Report. Published 2025. Checked 2026-09-02. Methodology
45 percent of U.S. consumers had used generative AI for local business recommendations in BrightLocal's 2026 survey.
Source: Local Consumer Review Survey 2026. Published 2026-02-11. Checked 2026-09-02. Methodology
Local Falcon ran 37,500 AI searches across 100 U.S. cities and five AI engines for its 2026 Realtor index.
Source: The Realtor AI Visibility Index. Published 2026-08-18. Checked 2026-09-02. Methodology
91.5 percent of the real-estate agents in Local Falcon's 2026 index were never cited by an AI engine.
Source: The Realtor AI Visibility Index. Published 2026-08-18. Checked 2026-09-02. Methodology
Reviews
Consumer survey figures show how reviews shape local decisions and how AI-generated summaries enter that process.
97 percent of U.S. consumers said they read online reviews for local businesses in BrightLocal's 2026 survey.
Source: Local Consumer Review Survey 2026. Published 2026-02-11. Checked 2026-09-02. Methodology
47 percent of U.S. consumers would not use a business with fewer than 20 reviews in BrightLocal's 2026 survey.
Source: Local Consumer Review Survey 2026. Published 2026-02-11. Checked 2026-09-02. Methodology
74 percent of U.S. consumers cared about reviews written within the previous three months in BrightLocal's 2026 survey.
Source: Local Consumer Review Survey 2026. Published 2026-02-11. Checked 2026-09-02. Methodology
82 percent of U.S. consumers read AI-generated review summaries in BrightLocal's 2026 survey.
Source: Local Consumer Review Survey 2026. Published 2026-02-11. Checked 2026-09-02. Methodology
Reading next
Changelog
September 2, 2026
First edition: 31 panel figures from the production pull of September 3, 2026 at 04:05 UTC and 25 figures from 7 public sources. The panel figures published before that pull landed, which came from an earlier snapshot, are superseded.
