Comscore report shows AI assistants reshaping discovery and search behavior

AI assistants are no longer just where people ask questions. Comscore’s first AI Intelligence Report of 2026 shows they are changing what consumers notice, what they trust and what they click before they ever reach a traditional search results page. The biggest signal is not only that usage is rising, but that discovery is fragmenting across Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini and Google’s AI layers in ways that reshape the path to purchase.

Claude posted the sharpest breakout, with desktop conversations surging 1,858% between October 2025 and March 2026. ChatGPT still dominated the category, logging 244 million desktop conversations in March 2026, up 55% year over year, and 87 million desktop visitors. Copilot reached 44 million desktop visitors in March, while Gemini hit 30 million. Comscore’s data also showed a clear demographic split on mobile: women indexed at 113 for ChatGPT, 123 for Copilot and 118 for Gemini, while men indexed at 87, 77 and 82 respectively. That is a useful warning sign for marketers who still treat AI usage as a single, undifferentiated audience.

The scale is already too large to dismiss as experimentation. Comscore said AI assistant tools reached 36% of desktop users and 23% of mobile users in Q1 2026, while U.S. desktop searches still reached 76 billion in the quarter, up 10% versus Q1 2024. In other words, AI is not replacing search so much as sitting on top of it, changing the first pass at discovery and influencing which sites, brands and products earn a click. Smriti Sharma, Comscore’s EVP of Analytics and Managing Director of Custom IQ, said the company is providing some of the industry’s first visibility into AI-influenced intent behavior, and that brands and publishers need to understand which sources AI references and how those interactions turn into measurable outcomes.

The commercial impact is clearest in credit cards. Comscore said AI Overviews appeared alongside 46% of paid search ads in Q4 2025, up from 21% in Q2 2025. Over the past three quarters, roughly 25% of credit card applicants were exposed to AI Overviews, and about 5% applied directly from pages where AI Overviews appeared. That makes AI summaries look less like a novelty and more like a real layer inside high-intent journeys, one that intersects with Google Ads and paid-search conversion paths.

The pattern builds on earlier Comscore findings. In December 2025, mobile visitation to leading AI assistant destinations reached 54.3 million, up 107% year over year, while desktop visitation hit 83.0 million, up 18%. Comscore’s 2025 AI Intelligence Report already showed more than 30% of desktop Google searches surfacing an AI Overview, up from 23% in April 2025, and nearly 63% of hotel bookers visiting an AI platform before booking. Steve Bagdasarian, Comscore’s chief commercial officer, framed the central question plainly: not whether AI will be used, but how consumers are using it to discover brands and make purchase decisions. That is the shift now driving SEO, content strategy and audience targeting into a far messier, more fragmented era.