AI Search in Malaysia: 2026 Statistics

Figures from our audit of 42 English marketing-services questions, asked through the Gemini and ChatGPT developer APIs (not the consumer apps) in two windows between 26 September and 4 October 2026. The method, data and limitations are in the full paper.

• 87.4% of Gemini's citations, and 59.9% of ChatGPT's, were pages that agencies and freelancers publish on their own websites; measured through the APIs, not the consumer apps, and for ChatGPT counting the inline citations attached to each answer (ALIQ Studio, 2026).
• 86.1% of Gemini's citations, and 84.8% of ChatGPT's, were providers' own pages when the question was whom to hire (an exploratory split by kind of question) (ALIQ Studio, 2026).
• 84 of 84: ChatGPT searched the web before every one of its answers about whom to hire, and Gemini before 82 of 84 (ALIQ Studio, 2026).
• 1.2% of Gemini's citations, and 4.2% of ChatGPT's, went to directories and review platforms (ALIQ Studio, 2026).
• 13.0% of Gemini's citations, and 0.9% of ChatGPT's, were "best agency" lists published on agencies' own websites (ALIQ Studio, 2026).
• 91.1% of Gemini's citations, and 81.0% of ChatGPT's, went to Malaysian businesses and publishers (a stated Malaysian base or legal entity, or a .my domain); publisher country was the less consistently coded of the two checked fields, Cohen's kappa 0.57 (ALIQ Studio, 2026).
• 4.3% of Gemini's citations of an agency's own page, and 18.5% of ChatGPT's, were the homepage; service or industry pages were 40.3% and 50.6% (page type was coded by the AI assistant and was not part of the blind re-code; this shows which pages were cited, not that adding a page leads to citation) (ALIQ Studio, 2026).
• 55.8% of the websites Gemini cited for a question, and 54.2% for ChatGPT, were cited for it again a week later; part of the change is ordinary variation between runs, and two windows are not a trend (ALIQ Studio, 2026).
• 24 websites made up half of all the times Gemini cited a website (counting each website once per answer), out of 249 it cited; for ChatGPT, 23 out of 219. This describes this panel, not market share (ALIQ Studio, 2026).

Published figures on how people and businesses in Malaysia use the internet and AI tools.

• 98.3% of individuals in Malaysia used the internet in 2025, and 94.6% of internet users searched for information on goods and services (Department of Statistics Malaysia, 2026a).
• 67% of Malaysian adults in a company-run online panel of 2,556 had used an AI tool in the past 3 months, in fieldwork from 29 December 2025 to 2 January 2026 (Vodus, 2026).
• 39.7% of Malaysia's GDP (RM689.8 billion) and 48.7% of employment (8.09 million persons) came from micro, small and medium enterprises in 2025 (Department of Statistics Malaysia, 2026b).
• 1,069,831 micro, small and medium establishments operated in Malaysia in 2022, up from 907,065 in 2015 (Department of Statistics Malaysia, 2024).
• 8 commercial queries on Malaysia-localised Google, in an earlier audit by a GEO agency: the local marketing-services queries returned map listings (Map Packs), not AI Overviews, in one snapshot on 21 July 2026. In our own study, all 12 prompts of an exploratory Google sub-panel, captured in one personalised browser, showed an AI answer in both windows in September and October 2026 (Ai Mode, 2026; ALIQ Studio, 2026).

Published figures measured worldwide or in other countries. Each line says where and when it was measured; none of them is a figure for Malaysia alone.

• Over 2.5 billion monthly active users for Google's AI Overviews, and over 1 billion for AI Mode, worldwide as of May 2026 (Pichai, 2026).
• 5.2% of ChatGPT conversation sessions led to a click out to another website, against a 31.1% referral ratio for Google, among US desktop users from October 2024 to July 2025, in a preprint (Shi, Zhu and Gu, 2026).
• 8% of visits to a Google results page with an AI summary led to a click on a traditional result, against 15% of visits without one; 1% of visits with a summary led to a click on a link inside it, in 900 US adults' browsing in March 2025 (Chapekis and Lieb, 2025; Chapekis et al., 2026).
• Under half of one percent of visits to the 74,752 websites in Ahrefs' analytics panel came from AI chatbots in March 2026 (0.28% in a company-run panel of sites that use its tool, not a representative sample) (Makosiewicz, 2026).
• 40.64% of the pages ChatGPT cited for agency prompts were "best X" blog lists, in a company-run Ahrefs study of 750 prompts in November 2025; the average across its three prompt categories was 43.8%, and the agency example prompts were set in London, so this shows direction, not size (Allsopp, 2025).
• Included by default: since 31 August 2026, Google's Search Console has a generative AI control that lets a site owner keep their pages in or out of AI Overviews and AI Mode, worldwide; pages are in unless the owner opts out (Google, n.d.).

Every figure from another publisher was read at its source and checked a second time before it went on this page, and each line keeps its source's own scope: where a figure was measured worldwide or in another country, the line says so. Figures from our study describe its question set and dates, not every question businesses ask. We re-check every figure when this page is updated.

How to cite this page: Yik Jinn (2026) AI Search in Malaysia: 2026 Statistics. ALIQ Studio. Available at: https://studio.aliqgroup.com/en/blog/ai-search-statistics-malaysia/. For the study's own figures, cite the paper (ALIQ Studio, 2026).

• Ai Mode (2026) State of AI Search in Malaysia 2026: What Commercial Queries Reveal About Who AI Cites. Available at: https://aimode.my/state-of-ai-search-malaysia-2026/.
• Allsopp, G. (2025) Do Self-Promotional "Best" Lists Boost ChatGPT Visibility? Study of 26,283 Source URLs. Ahrefs. Available at: https://ahrefs.com/blog/best-lists-research/.
• Chapekis, A. and Lieb, A. (2025) Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results. Pew Research Center. Available at: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/07/22/google-users-are-less-likely-to-click-on-links-when-an-ai-summary-appears-in-the-results/.
• Chapekis, A., Lieb, A., Shah, S. and Smith, A. (2026) Investigating Click Behaviors On Google Search Result Pages That Produce an AI Overview. arXiv. Available at: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.04831.
• Department of Statistics Malaysia (2024) Economic Census 2023: Profile of Small and Medium Enterprises. Available at: https://www.dosm.gov.my/site/downloadrelease?id=economic-census-2023-profile-of-small-and-medium-enterprises&lang=English&admin_view=.
• Department of Statistics Malaysia (2026a) ICT Use and Access by Individuals and Households Survey Report, 2025. Available at: https://www.dosm.gov.my/uploads/release-content/file_20260422202124.pdf.
• Department of Statistics Malaysia (2026b) Malaysia's Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) Performance 2025. Available at: https://www.dosm.gov.my/uploads/release-content/file_20260730113107.pdf.
• Google (n.d.) Search generative AI control. Search Console Help. Available at: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/16908024.
• Makosiewicz, M. (2026) AI Chatbot Traffic: What It Is, and How to Get More. Ahrefs. Available at: https://ahrefs.com/blog/ai-chatbot-traffic/.
• Pichai, S. (2026) Google I/O 2026: Sundar Pichai's opening keynote. Google. Available at: https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/sundar-pichai-io-2026/.
• Shi, Q., Zhu, K. and Gu, K. (2026) Answering Without Referring: How AI Search Rewrites the Web's Economic Bargain. arXiv. Available at: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07652.
• Vodus (2026) AI Usage in Malaysia 2026: Adoption, Trust, and What's Next. Available at: https://vodus.com/article/ai-usage-in-malaysia-2026-adoption-trust-and-whats-next.
• Yik Jinn, ALIQ Studio (2026) What AI answer engines cite when Malaysian SMEs ask for marketing help. Available at: https://studio.aliqgroup.com/en/research/ai-answer-citations-malaysia-2026/.