Hi,
Quick one. Before you read on, try this: ask ChatGPT who does good nails in your town. Any town, any trade. It will answer with total confidence and three names. Then check the three on Google. Somewhere in that list there is usually a business that is not the best-reviewed one in town, and somewhere off that list is the one that is.
That is the whole year in one answer, so here are the three numbers behind it.
28% of people in Spain now use ChatGPT frequently. It was 4% in 2023, 14% in 2024. Funcas, December fieldwork, 1,200 people. Nothing else in the survey moved like that.
In SE Ranking's sample of 101,574 sites, organic search's share of traffic in Spain went from 52% in 2025 to 41% in January to April 2026. Eleven points. Globally it lost two and a half. SE Ranking does not pin the drop on AI alone, but a sample that size is not one dashboard having a bad month.
And more than 84% of the links assistants cite come from earned and third-party sources: journalism, government and NGO sites, research, encyclopedias, other companies' pages. Journalism alone is 22%. Paid content: 0.3%. Muck Rack, October 2026. You cannot buy your way into the answer, and you cannot write your way in from your own homepage either.
So what would I do this week, if I ran a brand in Spain. Not a strategy deck. One thing: type the five questions your buyers actually ask into ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, and count how many times you are named. Write the number down. Most companies I meet have never done it, and the number is usually zero, which is at least a clean baseline.
If you want the version with the error bars, I do it as a five-day audit and it comes back with the sources that decide the answer. If you want to do it yourself, the method is public, five runs per question, and all the numbers above are on one page with their dates.
Dima
P.S. Every number here has a source and a date on that page. When one moves, the page says so, and so will the next letter.
Correction, 30 October 2026. Two figures above were restated with their scope. The 52% to 41% is organic search's share of traffic in Spain inside SE Ranking's sample of 101,574 sites, full-year 2025 against January to April 2026, not all traffic to Spanish sites. The 84% is what Muck Rack calls earned and third-party sources, a much wider set than press coverage; its October 2026 edition puts it above 84%, with journalism alone at 22%.
