There’s no shortage of opinion on how artificial intelligence is changing how people research, evaluate, and decide online. Bold claims are abundant but, what’s still rare, is behavioral data showing how consumers are actually navigating digital environments.
Behavioral data refers to observed digital activity. What people do online, rather than what they report in surveys. That perspective makes it possible to see how consumer decision-making is evolving as AI tools enter everyday use.
RealityMine® measures what users are doing across apps, search, and content consumption, and the patterns emerging from the data suggest that AI is compressing the research and discovery stages of digital decision-making in ways that are already changing where decisions happen.
One of the earliest predictions about AI was that chatbots would cannibalize Google and other traditional search engines, and users would simply switch. Behavioral data doesn’t support this.
The average user is executing 50% more Google searches per month than they were a year ago, up from 27 searches in March 2025 to 40 per person in January 2026. Search activity is increasing rather than declining.
What has changed is the structure of those searches. Search queries are becoming longer and more conversational. The average search has grown from 23 characters to 25, and nearly one in four Google searches is now over 30 characters. 14% of Google searches now begin with a question word — who, what, where, when, why — up from 11% a year ago.
Users are no longer typing shorthand to get a list of options. They’re asking in sentences, expecting something closer to a conversation. The search box is morphing into something closer to a prompt, and that tells us a great deal about where user expectations are heading, even within Google’s own interface.
This surge isn’t limited to search usage. AI applications are moving into everyday digital behavior at striking speed.
Users opened AI apps three times more often in January 2026 than they did ten months earlier, increasing from an average of six sessions per month to around 18. They even spent 3.4 times as long in those apps over the same period.
ChatGPT alone now reaches nearly one in three users, roughly doubling its reach in less than a year and becoming a normalized utility.
Meanwhile, the sites that historically sat between the search bar and the decision — the WebMDs, the CNETs, the Investopedias, the WikiHows — are stagnant or in decline. Reach, time on site, frequency of visits: the trajectory is flat or falling across this cohort of traditional research and review properties.
The process that once looked like
Search → Click → Read → Decide
is collapsing into a single interaction. Users are getting their answer in the search result itself, or within an AI app, without ever visiting the site that would previously have provided it.
That shift reduces the number of steps between question and answer, and it removes many of the intermediaries that once shaped consumer research.
Another pattern emerging from behavioral data is a change in how people distribute their attention across digital environments.
Users are engaging with 13% fewer apps per month than they were ten months ago. At the same time, they’re spending 12% more time on their phones. A similar pattern appears on the web: the number of domains visited has risen modestly from 208 to 225 per person per month while average time spent has doubled.
This points to a concentration of digital behavior. People are going deeper into fewer environments instead of sampling large numbers of apps or websites.
There is, however, an important nuance here. Users aren’t simply consolidating around the same dominant platforms. The biggest apps are not necessarily getting bigger. The top 25 apps’ share of total time has actually fallen, from 71% to 66%. Engagement is deepening, but it is doing so across a broader set of destinations.
For brands trying to influence the customer journey, this creates a different competitive environment. Winning attention increasingly requires relevance within the environments where users are already spending time.
Which platforms benefit from a structural shift in behavior?
AI applications are the obvious winner. Messaging apps are also experiencing surprising levels of growth, despite having extremely high levels of adoption already.
On the other side of the equation, websites built around informational content and comparison research are experiencing noticeable declines. Categories such as tech reviews, health advice, and how-to content are seeing meaningful reductions in reach, with declines of 20% to 25%.
These sites historically sat between the question and the purchase decision. They provided the information layer that helped people evaluate options before making a decision.
As AI tools begin to provide answers directly, that middle layer is becoming less visible within the journey.
For organizations trying to understand how consumers actually make decisions online, these behavioral changes raise an important measurement challenge.
Traditional journey maps assume that research, comparison, and evaluation happen across a sequence of websites, content properties, and search results. As AI interfaces become a primary source of answers, those steps may no longer be observable in the same way.
Consumers are still researching. They are still evaluating options. But the places where those activities happen are changing.
Understanding where AI now sits inside consumer decision-making, and where decisions are formed, is becoming a critical capability for marketing, product, and insight teams.
Because if the journey has changed, the strategies built around it will need to change as well.
Billy leads RealityMine’s product roadmap, ensuring it meets the evolving needs of clients across industries. He joined RealityMine in 2018 and has worked in the digital behavioural data space since 2011. With a passion for solving complex measurement and business challenges, Billy plays a key role in shaping solutions that help clients make smarter, more confident decisions.
