Top Takeaways From SimilarWeb’s 2025 Report: Generative AI Landscape - The State of Gen AI
Review key insights from SimilarWeb’s 2025 Gen AI report, including platform growth, AI-driven discovery trends, and what businesses must prepare for next.
SimilarWeb’s 2025 Generative AI Landscape: The State of Gen AI lays out one of the clearest data-driven pictures of how generative AI is transforming digital behavior.
What began as experimentation in 2023 has now become a structural shift in how people discover information, evaluate products, and interact with the web.
Below are the most important takeaways from the report.
1. Generative AI Platforms Are Experiencing Explosive Growth
The report highlights rapid expansion across every major engagement metric:
- 76% year-over-year growth in average monthly visits to generative-AI platforms.
- 319% increase in AI app downloads, showing that adoption is accelerating on mobile as well.
- 1.1 billion referral visits generated by AI platforms in June 2025 alone, which is a 357% YoY surge.
This is no longer an early-adopter trend. Generative AI is now a mainstream discovery layer.
2. AI Is Reshaping Digital Discovery
One of the major themes in the report is how AI is changing the way people find information.
Instead of relying solely on traditional search queries, users are increasingly starting with AI chat interfaces. They ask broader questions, request summaries, compare options, and evaluate products through conversational prompts, often without leaving the interface.
For brands, this means:
- Visibility inside AI answers now matters as much as visibility in search engines.
- The channel that influences user decisions is shifting upstream, before a user ever makes a click.
Generative AI is no longer just a tool. It has become a discovery engine.
3. Click Volumes Are Not the Only Success Metric Anymore
While referral traffic from AI assistants is growing, SimilarWeb notes that traffic alone does not represent the full value of AI visibility.
Even when clicks plateau, brand exposure inside LLM responses continues to rise. The influence generated by being cited as the authoritative answer, even without a click, is becoming a critical performance indicator.
This is accelerating a shift from:
- Measuring traffic to
- Measuring visibility, influence, and citation frequency within AI systems.
For SEO and growth teams, this represents an entirely new category of KPIs.
"The future of AI search is paradoxical: generative AI engines will send less traffic, but that traffic will matter more. Similarweb GenAI traffic data already shows that referrals from ChatGPT are smaller in volume than Google’s, but those visitors spend more time on site, view more pages per visit, and convert at higher rates. As AI engines and hybrid experiences continue to scale, GEO is becoming more about strategic presence: earning a place in a smaller number of high-intent recommendations that drive outsized business impact." - Limor Barenholtz, Director of SEO, Similarweb
4. Businesses Need AI-Specific Optimization Strategies
SimilarWeb’s analysis makes one thing clear: companies cannot treat AI platforms as extensions of traditional SEO.
New strategies are required, including:
- Optimizing for AI mentions and increasing brand authority inside generative models.
- Monitoring AI referral behavior and identifying where models pull information from.
- Benchmarking competitors’ AI visibility, not just their search rankings.
SimilarWeb’s GenAI Intelligence Toolkit reflects this shift by measuring where and how brands appear across AI assistants, providing a new layer of competitive intelligence.
5. User Behavior Is Evolving Faster Than Platforms Can Adapt
The report highlights several broader ecosystem trends:
- Users increasingly prefer conversational, interactive, and multi-modal experiences.
- AI systems are becoming the first stop for research-based queries, decision-making, and product comparisons.
- Traditional search experiences, especially long-form guides, are declining in importance as users seek immediate, authoritative answers.
This creates both opportunity and pressure: companies that adapt early will gain disproportionate visibility inside AI systems, while laggards risk disappearing from the new discovery funnel entirely.
Conclusion
AI Visibility Is the New Competitive Battleground
SimilarWeb’s 2025 report confirms what many growth, SEO, and marketing leaders have sensed anecdotally for months: generative AI is not a temporary disruption. It is redefining how people discover, evaluate, and interact with information online.
The companies that will win in this new landscape are those that:
- Understand how AI assistants surface information
- Optimize their presence inside generative systems
- Track AI-driven discovery with the same rigor they apply to traditional SEO
AI visibility is quickly becoming one of the most important drivers of brand influence, and 2025 is the year this shift became undeniable.
