State of Web 2026: How AI Is Reshaping the Internet

While search and social remain the dominant gateways to the internet, AI assistants emerged as the fastest-growing category of 2025. Platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and DeepSeek are rapidly changing how users discover information, research products, and engage online.

At the same time, broader structural shifts continue to define the modern web. Sensor Tower’s State of Web 2026 report reveals that mobile now accounts for the majority of visits, desktop still dominates engagement, and search, social, and AI are battling for the future of discovery.

AI Assistants Become a New Layer of the Web

Generative AI rapidly evolved from an experimental tool into a core web behavior in 2025. AI assistant traffic surged 86% YoY globally, making it the fastest-growing web category. ChatGPT alone added more than 60 billion visits YoY and became the #6 most visited website worldwide.

This momentum extended across the broader AI ecosystem. Gemini, Claude, DeepSeek, and Grok all ranked among the top breakout websites globally by traffic and time spent, while engagement with AI assistants in the US increased more than 3x since early 2024.

The rise of AI is also beginning to influence the broader web economy. Visits to traditional informational categories like News and Education softened in 2025, signaling that users are increasingly relying on AI-driven synthesis instead of navigating directly across multiple websites.

Mobile Won Traffic, Desktop Still Owns Engagement

The web is increasingly mobile-first, but user behavior remains highly fragmented across devices. Mobile accounted for 47.6% of visits in 2025, and in Q1 2026, mobile accounted for more than half of all global web visits for the first time. Growth was fueled by rising adoption in mobile-first markets like India and Indonesia, alongside increasing mobile usage across mature markets including the United States.

Despite this shift, desktop still represented more than 70% of total web time spent globally, reflecting the web’s continued importance for productivity, research, and longer-form engagement.

AI assistants are also beginning to bridge this divide. Cross-platform AI usage more than doubled between early 2024 and late 2025 as users increasingly moved between browser-based workflows and mobile AI experiences.

Looking beyond browser activity alone, Sensor Tower’s True Audience metric measures unique users across mobile apps, mobile web, and desktop web. Across this broader digital ecosystem, Alphabet and Meta continue to command a global attention duopoly, led by Google with an average monthly True Audience of 2.9 billion users in 2025.

Search, Social, and AI Are Battling for the Future of Discovery

Even as AI accelerates, the web remains highly concentrated around a small number of dominant platforms. Browsers & Search Engines and Social Media together generated more than 2.4 trillion visits globally in 2025, reinforcing their role as the internet’s primary discovery infrastructure. While visits to both subgenres remained relatively flat YoY in 2025, time spent declined (-1% for Social Media and -7% for Browsers & Search Engines), suggesting that AI assistants are beginning to capture engagement from traditional market leaders.

Social media also remained one of the largest discovery drivers across categories ranging from streaming and gaming to AI assistants themselves. Meanwhile, emerging AI traffic sources remain relatively small overall, accounting for less than 1% of total web traffic despite rapid growth.

Despite its relatively small scale, AI is already influencing consumer behavior across sectors ranging from retail to travel. For example, Amazon shoppers utilizing Rufus convert at nearly twice the rate of non-Rufus shoppers. And Gen AI-driven traffic continues to climb for most subgenres, including traffic to top travel booking services surging from 1 million visits in Q1 2024 to nearly 3 million in Q1 2026.

This dynamic suggests that AI is not replacing the traditional web ecosystem overnight, but rather emerging as a new discovery layer alongside search and social.

Additional Highlights:

Read Sensor Tower’s first edition of State of Web, spanning more than 20 markets in a dynamic, interactive format covering:

• Web Usage Overview - Where web traffic is growing and shrinking across markets, along with top websites

• Acquisition: How Users Discover & Enter - Traffic sources reveal how websites drive their traffic, from reliance on social and paid sources to the rising relevance of Gen AI

• Engagement: How Users Interact & Invest Time - Website path data reveals how short-form video usage is growing on web browsers and helps measure how effectively ad campaigns drive lower-funnel actions like checkout visits

• User Journey & Traffic Flow - Traffic flow reveals which sites users visit before yours, and where they go after

• Device Overlap: App vs. Web - Discover which brands have achieved omnichannel success, reaching users across app and web

• AI Snapshot - Discover how AI is boosting brand visibility and driving traffic for specific verticals like retail and travel

Sensor Tower’s State of Web 2026 report explores the evolving digital landscape across traffic, engagement, AI referrals, omnichannel behavior, and web discovery trends across global markets and industries.

Download the full report to explore the data shaping the future of the web.