News Outlets Published 5.8 Times More Articles About AI Search in the First Nine Months of 2026 Than in the Same Period of 2023

Summary

Picture a bakery owner in Ohio who hears from a customer that Google now answers questions with an AI summary at the top of the page. A week later her nephew says he just asks ChatGPT. She wonders if this is a real shift or a tech fad. One way to check is to count how often the news writes about it.

We searched the GDELT news database, which logs articles from tens of thousands of outlets worldwide, for articles about AI search: Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, ChatGPT search, Perplexity and AI search engines in general. We found 22,024 of them between January 2022 and September 2026.

From January to September 2026, news sites published 5,688 AI search articles, 5.9 times the 967 published in the same months of 2023. Coverage peaked in 2025 and has eased since, but it is still running far above where it was two years ago.

What we measured

GDELT stores metadata for each article it processes, including the URL, the outlet and a tone score, but not the full text. We matched article URL slugs against a list of AI search terms, such as ai-overview, google ai-mode, searchgpt, chatgpt-search, perplexity, ai-search and answer-engine, plus common German, French, Spanish and Italian phrasings. Each URL was counted once.

To account for changes in how many articles GDELT collects each month, we also counted every article in the database by month and report coverage per million articles. A spot check of 50 random matched URLs found all 50 were about AI search products or AI search companies, though a few covered enterprise or self-hosted AI search tools rather than consumer search.

AI search coverage climbed in waves, with each wave lining up with a launch or a deal

Monthly counts were close to zero through 2022. The first jump came in February 2023 with 236 articles, the month Microsoft added a chatbot to Bing and Google announced Bard. After that, every big spike lines up with a product launch or a company headline.

May 2024 brought 710 articles, and 361 of them named Google's AI features. That coincides with the launch of AI Overviews in the US and the stories about odd answers that followed. July 2024 had 775, with 559 naming SearchGPT. August 2025 was the top month at 1,635, driven by Perplexity, which appeared in 1,111 slugs that month. The most common slug word that month after the brand names was chrome, in 607 articles.

Measured against all news, AI search coverage grew seven-fold

GDELT collected fewer articles overall in 2026 than in 2024, so raw counts understate the shift. Per million articles processed, AI search coverage went from 10.0 in the first nine months of 2023 to 69.8 in the same months of 2026.

AI search also took a bigger slice of all AI news. In the first nine months of 2025, 1.2% of AI-related articles (7,498 of 610,575) were about AI search. In 2026 that share fell back to 0.6% (5,688 of 900,559) because general AI coverage grew faster than AI search coverage did.

Google's AI features and Perplexity carried most of the growth

We split the articles by the product named in the slug. An article can name more than one, so the columns overlap.

In 2023 most coverage talked about AI search in general terms. By 2025 named products took over: Perplexity appeared in 3,994 slugs and Google's AI features in 1,771. In 2026 the general phrase ai-search came back to the top with 2,662 slugs, which suggests the topic has become a category that writers name on its own.

What this means

Coverage at this level likely means many of your customers have read about AI answers, even if they have not changed how they search yet. When the news talks about a channel this often, many people try it. Plenty of owners will try it out of curiosity before they ever talk to an AI SEO agency about it. That makes it worth knowing what ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews say when someone asks about your type of business in your area.

Start by asking each tool the questions your customers ask and noting whether you appear, whether the facts are right, and which sources the answer cites. If you want a structured version of that check, our free AI visibility audit runs it across the prompts that matter for your business, the same way a GEO agency would before changing anything.

Limits

GDELT does not store article text, so we matched URL slugs. Articles with numeric or non-Latin URLs (common in Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Arabic outlets) are undercounted.

Perplexity coverage includes company news such as funding, acquisition offers and lawsuits, not only stories about its search product.

GDELT's monthly article volume varies. June 2025 had about half the usual volume because of a collection gap, so that month's count is low.

Counts reflect articles GDELT processed, which is a large sample of global online news, not every article published.

Frequently asked questions

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