New data reveals a concerning trend for AI-powered search platforms: despite growing awareness and usage, mobile adoption is lagging dramatically behind desktop use.
According to newly released research from enterprise SEO platform BrightEdge, over 90% of referral traffic from leading AI search engines—including ChatGPT, Perplexity, Bing, and Google Gemini—comes from desktop users. This finding underscores a widening gap in consumer penetration and engagement on mobile devices, signaling a fundamental challenge for AI adoption at scale.
BrightEdge’s data paints a stark picture:
The only exception is Google Search, which still maintains a relatively balanced traffic flow, with 53% of its referrals coming from mobile devices and 44% from desktop.
This overwhelming desktop dominance indicates that AI search tools have not successfully migrated into the daily mobile habits of average users, despite growing investment in mobile apps and integrations.
The architecture of mobile AI apps may be partly to blame. BrightEdge points to in-app preview limitations—particularly within ChatGPT's mobile app—as a structural issue. Unlike desktop, where links open directly to external sites, ChatGPT mobile displays previews inside the app. Users must then click again to exit the app, adding friction to the referral process.
Despite millions of app downloads, actual traffic conversion—users clicking through to external websites—is anemic on mobile across platforms. This suggests limited utility, shorter sessions, and casual browsing behavior dominate mobile AI usage—far from the productive search intent seen on desktops.
Google maintains an 89% overall search market share and a 93% share of mobile search globally, thanks largely to its default status in the Safari browser on Apple devices. BrightEdge’s data notes that Apple iPhones alone account for 57–58% of Google’s mobile traffic to brand websites in the U.S. and Europe.
This makes Apple’s role pivotal. Safari—installed on nearly 1 billion devices—acts as the gatekeeper of mobile web search. As Apple prepares to unveil new product updates at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), industry experts are watching closely for signals that the tech giant could shift the default Safari search engine away from Google.
Such a move could reallocate hundreds of millions of search queries overnight, dramatically reshaping the digital marketing and AI search ecosystem.
Perplexity—a rising AI-native search engine—has already positioned itself as a potential beneficiary of any Safari shake-up. With only 3.4% of its traffic from mobile, the company has everything to gain from deeper mobile integration.
If Apple were to embed Perplexity—or any other AI engine—as a default or featured search tool, the resulting traffic surge could 10x or 20x mobile referrals overnight.
Consider this: if 58% of Google's mobile traffic comes from iPhones, and Google sends over 1 billion monthly visits to brand websites globally, then roughly 580 million monthly mobile visits hinge on iPhone search behavior.
Redirecting even 10% of that traffic to a different AI search engine would instantly generate 58 million new mobile visits—a massive boost for any emerging competitor.
The numbers also reinforce a broader behavioral split in how users interact with AI. On desktops, users turn to tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity for deep research, professional tasks, and structured queries—contexts that often lead to external link clicks. On mobile, however, AI search behavior is largely lightweight, passive, and app-contained.
This mirrors broader digital habits: average session durations are longer on desktop (11–13 minutes for AI chat apps) versus under 3 minutes on mobile, according to internal estimates and third-party tracking tools. This kind of behavioral disparity is detrimental to monetization models that rely on engagement, ads, or link clicks.
While generative AI and chatbot tools dominate headlines, these findings reveal a hard truth: mass consumer integration—especially on mobile—is not yet a reality. Usage remains largely confined to early adopters, knowledge workers, and technical users, most of whom still prefer desktop environments.
This is problematic for companies betting on ubiquitous AI usage as their growth engine. Without strong mobile penetration, it will be difficult to achieve the scale required to monetize AI-powered search in the same way traditional engines like Google have.
As Apple gears up for major announcements at WWDC, the search and AI industries are bracing for potential disruption. A new default search partner, or deeper AI integration into Apple’s mobile ecosystem, could radically redistribute power across the search landscape.
Until then, the data is clear: AI may be evolving rapidly, but its mobile adoption is not. For now, desktop dominates, and without a meaningful breakthrough in user behavior, AI-powered search risks stalling at the starting line in the consumer mobile race.