DIGITAL 2027 | Gen AI reaches 3.24 billion users worldwide
The findings point to a digital environment increasingly shaped by AI platforms, social networks and mobile applications, with changes in how people discover information, research products and interact with online content.
Generative artificial intelligence tools attracted 3.24 billion active users worldwide, while social media user identities climbed to 5.81 billion as of October 2026, according to the Digital 2027 report released by We Are Social and Meltwater.
The Meltwater & We Are Social’s Digital 2027: Global Report, released on Oct. 21, estimates that 38.9 percent of the global population now uses generative AI tools monthly. The figure represents a 57.2 percent increase over the past 12 months, adding approximately 1.2 billion users.
Social media user identities reached 69.9 percent of the world’s population, an increase of 151 million, or 2.7 percent, over the same period.
The findings point to a digital environment increasingly shaped by AI platforms, social networks and mobile applications, with changes in how people discover information, research products and interact with online content.
However, the report also highlights a more complicated shift in internet behavior. While AI adoption continues to accelerate, traditional web traffic and the time people spend browsing the web have declined, suggesting that digital activity is becoming more concentrated in platforms and applications.
AI adoption expands as competitors gain ground
ChatGPT remains the leading generative AI platform, attracting twice as many monthly active users as its nearest competitor, according to the report.
Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude are gaining ground. Gemini’s mobile applications recorded a fourfold increase in active users over the past year, while its web user base reached more than 60 percent of ChatGPT’s.
The findings indicate that the generative AI market continues to expand beyond its early leaders as more people incorporate AI tools into their online activities.
The figures do not, by themselves, establish how frequently people use these services, what tasks they perform with them or whether adoption translates into sustained reliance on AI-generated information. Nevertheless, the scale of reported adoption suggests that AI platforms are becoming a significant part of the global digital ecosystem.
The growth also raises questions about how people will find information in the future, particularly as AI assistants increasingly provide synthesized answers that can reduce the need to visit individual websites.
Despite the shift, search engines remain important to online research. Digital 2027 found that adults are 74 percent more likely to say they visit search engines than AI platforms when researching brands.
The distinction suggests that AI adoption has not eliminated traditional search behavior, even as the ways people access and consume information continue to evolve.
Social media captures more online attention
Global social media user identities reached 5.81 billion, equivalent to 69.9 percent of the world’s population. The report recorded 151 million additional identities over the previous year.
The figure refers to social media user identities, not necessarily unique individuals. It should therefore not be interpreted as a direct count of people, since one person may maintain multiple accounts.
Time spent on social media and online video platforms also increased. The typical internet user now spends an average of 19 hours and 18 minutes per week on these services, a 3.8 percent increase over the past year.
YouTube accounted for the largest share of total time spent on social media globally, followed by WhatsApp and Instagram. TikTok led in average daily time spent per active user, at one hour and 55 minutes.
The findings illustrate how digital platforms compete not only for users but also for their attention, with video, messaging and social networking services serving different roles in daily online activity.
For businesses, the growth of social media also reinforces the importance of online communities and recommendations in consumer decisions. Among internet users aged 16 to 24, 46.9 percent use platforms such as Instagram and Facebook as their primary source of information when researching brands and potential purchases.
The figure points to a generational shift in product discovery, where social platforms can function as research destinations rather than simply places to communicate or share content.
However, the report’s findings do not establish that social media is the sole or dominant influence on every purchase. Search engines, reviews, news coverage and other sources continue to contribute to how consumers evaluate products and services.
Traditional web traffic declines
Digital 2027 reported a decline in traffic across the world’s top 10,000 web domains, with total monthly traffic down more than 10 percent since ChatGPT’s public launch.
The report also found that the total time people spend using the web fell by 11.2 percent over the past 24 months.
The findings coincide with the growing use of AI-powered services and native mobile applications, which can deliver information or services without requiring users to navigate multiple websites.
However, the report does not attribute the entire decline in web traffic to generative AI. It acknowledges that online behavior is changing for several reasons, making it difficult to isolate the effect of AI from other developments in digital consumption.
The continued popularity of search engines also complicates the idea that AI is replacing traditional online discovery. Although AI platforms are gaining users, search remains a more commonly reported destination for people researching brands.
For publishers, businesses and other organizations that depend on website traffic, the changing pattern could affect how audiences discover their content. Organizations may need to consider how their information appears across search engines, social platforms, mobile applications and AI-generated responses.
The challenge is not simply to attract visits to a website but also to maintain visibility and credibility when users increasingly encounter information through intermediaries.
Digital advertising continues to grow
The report found that digital advertising spending increased by 8.7 percent over the past year. Social media advertising spending rose by 18 percent, while influencer advertising spending increased by 15 percent.
These figures suggest that advertisers continue to direct resources toward digital channels, particularly social media and creators who can reach established online communities.
The typical online adult now uses an average of 5.8 different channels to discover new brands, underscoring the fragmented nature of digital marketing.
The results indicate that businesses cannot rely on a single channel to reach potential customers. Search, social media, news coverage, online video and AI-powered services can all influence the process through which people encounter and evaluate brands.
Suzie Shaw, CEO of We Are Social APAC, said AI was changing how consumers discover brands, but social media remained central to online conversations and preferences.
“AI is changing how people discover brands, but social remains central to where people spend their time and form preferences,” Shaw said.
“The conversations, recommendations and opinions people share online are increasingly informing the answers AI gives and the decisions people make.”
Shaw said brands could optimize their published content but could not control what people said about them. She argued that their reputations and the communities they built would become increasingly important as AI-generated answers became more prominent.
“The brands that win won’t just be the ones that appear in AI-generated answers, but the ones people are genuinely interested in, talking about and recommending in the first place,” she said.
Her comments reflect a growing marketing focus on how information about a brand circulates across online communities, alongside efforts to improve its visibility in search results and AI-generated responses.
APAC markets face different digital behaviors
Mimrah Mahmood, Meltwater’s vice president of enterprise sales for Asia-Pacific, said the region’s varied digital behaviors and platform preferences made it difficult for brands to depend on a single channel.
“With generative AI adoption surging nearly 60% in the last year, the customer journey is being rewritten in real time—changing how people discover information and evaluate brands,” Mahmood said.
He said marketers and communications teams needed to assess their presence across news, social media, search and AI-powered environments rather than examine each channel in isolation.
Mahmood also highlighted the influence of cultural context and language on how audiences across Asia-Pacific perceive brands.
The regional perspective is relevant to markets such as the Philippines, where businesses operate in a multilingual environment and audiences use a mix of social networks, messaging applications, search services and video platforms.
However, the report’s global figures should not be treated as a direct measure of Philippine behavior. The release does not provide country-specific figures for generative AI adoption, social media use or changes in web traffic.
Local conclusions would require data that separates the Philippines from broader global and regional trends.
Internet access continues to expand
Digital 2027 estimates that 6.15 billion people use the internet, representing 73.9 percent of the global population.
The figure highlights the continued expansion of internet access while also showing that a substantial share of the world’s population remains offline.
The report draws on data from research and analytics providers, including GWI, Similarweb and Statista. It spans the online ecosystem in a 900-page annual assessment of digital behavior and trends.
Among its lighter findings, the report noted that Google search data returned 4.15 billion results for cats by the end of 2026, compared with 4.02 billion for dogs.
The broader findings present a digital environment in which access, attention and discovery are changing at the same time. Generative AI is reaching billions of users, social platforms continue to attract substantial engagement, and advertising spending is shifting toward digital channels.
Yet the data also show that established services such as search engines remain important, while the decline in traditional web traffic cannot be explained by AI adoption alone.
For technology companies, publishers, advertisers and policymakers, the challenge is to distinguish between growing platform usage and meaningful changes in how people access reliable information, make decisions and participate online.
Full disclosure: All news articles published on the TechSabado website are written by human journalists, unless otherwise specified. Final text editing is also performed by human editors, with artificial intelligence (AI) used only to assist with additional grammar and style guide corrections..
————————————————————————-
TEN YEARS OF TECHSABADO!
PLEASE LIKE our FACEBOOK PAGE and SUBSCRIBE to OUR YOUTUBE & SPOTIFY channels.
WATCH TECHSABADO ON OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL:
WE ARE ALSO ON SPOTIFY
WATCH OUR OTHER YOUTUBE CHANNELS:
PLEASE LIKE our FACEBOOK PAGE and SUBSCRIBE to OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL.
