We Are Social and Meltwater have released the Digital 2027 report, which says 3.24 billion people now use generative AI tools each month.
Global internet users have reached 6.15 billion, while active social media users stand at 5.81 billion. That puts social media audiences close to the scale of global television viewership.
The data points to a broad shift in how people spend time online. Across the world's 10,000 largest web domains, total monthly web traffic has fallen by more than 10 per cent since the public launch of ChatGPT, while time spent on the web has dropped by 11.2 per cent over the past 24 months.
At the same time, people are spending more time on social media and online video platforms. The typical internet user now spends an average of 19 hours and 18 minutes a week on those services, up 3.8 per cent over the past year.
Generative AI adoption has risen sharply over the past 12 months. The report estimates that active users increased by 57.2 per cent in a year, adding 1.2 billion new users globally.
ChatGPT remains the largest platform by monthly active users, with roughly twice the audience of its nearest rival. Google's Gemini and Anthropic's Claude have also gained ground, with Gemini's mobile app users rising fourfold over the year and its web audience reaching more than 60 per cent of ChatGPT's size.
Despite that growth, search engines remain more widely used than AI tools for brand research. Online adults are still 74 per cent more likely to say they visit search engines when researching brands than to use an AI platform.
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