Digital 2027: GenAI Use Expands as Web Traffic Falls

AI use is widespread, while paid adoption remains limited

The clearest signal in Meltwater and We Are Social’s Digital 2027 report is a shift in how people find and use information. Generative AI has reached billions of monthly users, while traffic to leading web domains has dropped. The report, released in October, also tracks mobile and social media use across the world and in the Philippines, giving those changes a broader digital context.

Globally, 3.24 billion people—38.9% of the world’s 8.32 billion population—use generative AI tools each month. That represents about 1.2 billion new users, though the report cautions that one person may hold multiple accounts to separate work and personal use. The distinction matters: account counts can show how widely a service has been adopted, but they don’t translate neatly into a count of individual people.

In the Philippines, 94.4% of internet users aged 16 and older said they used AI tools monthly. Only 5.5% of that group paid for an AI subscription. Among active AI users aged 16 and older, 71.17% use the tools to find information, 37.6% seek advice about problems, and 32.8% ask for personalized recommendations. Just 27.5% of Philippine internet users aged 16 and older believe AI benefits society overall.

That gap between broad use and limited paid adoption suggests AI is becoming a routine utility for many users, even as relatively few pay directly for access. The figures also point to a divide between practical use and public confidence: people may turn to AI for everyday tasks without being convinced it benefits society. This is more significant than it looks, because frequency of use alone doesn’t tell us whether people trust the answers or see lasting value in the tools. The figures come from the report’s Philippines country headlines.

Mobile and social figures require a counting caveat

The report puts global social media identities at 5.81 billion, or 69.9% of the world’s population. As with AI accounts, the total may include people maintaining separate profiles for personal and work use. These are identities, then, rather than a clean count of unique people; readers should be cautious about treating them as a direct measure of how many individuals are active on social platforms.

Data from GSMA Intelligence and Ericsson indicate 5.86 billion unique mobile phone users worldwide. Ericsson estimates that 7.68 billion smartphones are in use, accounting for nearly 90% of active handsets and nearly 86% of cellular connections. Those totals also reflect the possibility that an individual owns more than one smartphone. In other words, the number of devices and connections describes the scale of mobile infrastructure, while unique-user estimates come closer to describing how many people use it.

The Philippines had 118 million residents, up 936,000 from the previous year, and 149 million cellular connections—126% of its population. Internet use reached 95.9 million people, or 81.3% of residents. The country had 94.7 million social media user identities, a decline of about 1.1 million. Those measures capture different things: connections can outnumber residents, and social identities can exceed or fall short of a population trend without showing exactly how many individuals have stopped using a platform.

Traffic to leading web domains has weakened

Across the world’s 10,000 most visited web domains, monthly traffic fell by more than 10% after ChatGPT launched in 2022. Visits dropped by almost 50 billion per month between the fourth quarter of 2022 and the second quarter of 2026. Time spent on those sites declined 11.2% over a two-year period, a reduction of more than 6.6 billion hours per month. The pattern is striking, but the figures describe a large group of domains and a period of change; by themselves, they don’t establish that AI caused the decline.

AI use may be part of the shift, but the report also points to people relying more on native mobile apps instead of browsers. That matters because a change in where people access a service can reduce visits counted on a website without reducing their activity with the service itself. And yet the decline in visits hasn’t meant that the web has stopped attracting activity: users still loaded just under 3 trillion pages per month across the top 10,000 domains in the second quarter of 2026, more than 2% above the same period in 2024.

Here’s the thing: the report presents several plausible forces, not a single explanation. A browser visit, an app session, and an AI query don’t measure the same behavior, so a drop in one channel can’t tell the whole story. If you're working in this space, the useful question is whether people are getting information through different routes, or whether they’re spending less time with these services altogether. The figures leave that distinction open.

What the shifts mean for digital behavior

The report’s figures suggest that digital use is changing shape: AI tools are reaching a broad audience, mobile connections remain numerous, and traffic to leading domains has weakened. But the measures carry different caveats, from duplicate accounts to multiple devices and growing use of apps. Taken together, they’re a useful snapshot of behavior, not a definitive explanation of why it’s changing.

For publishers and other web businesses, the traffic decline raises a practical question about how users discover information and where they spend time. If AI tools answer some queries directly and apps keep people inside their own interfaces, browser traffic may become a less complete measure of audience reach. The report doesn’t establish how much each factor contributes, so claims about a lasting shift should be treated with care.

One complication (and this is the part most people overlook): broad adoption doesn’t necessarily mean broad approval. The Philippines figures show high monthly use alongside a low share of users who believe AI benefits society overall, while paid subscriptions remain uncommon. Useful, familiar, and trusted aren’t the same thing.

The report runs more than 900 pages and covers digital behavior from AI adoption to mobile use. It draws on a series of focused analyses by author Simon Kemp; the full report is available through We Are Social, with related country and topic reports at DataReportal.