New data published this month by Edison Research at SSRS shows weekly AI chatbot usage among American adults has climbed to 65%, adding an estimated 35.6 million users in just three months - a pace that places AI adoption among the most rapid in the history of consumer media technology.

Weekly AI usage reaches 175.5 million American adults

Edison Research at SSRS this month released the May 2026 edition of its AI User Metrics report, documenting a sharp increase in the share of U.S. adults using at least one AI platform in the past week. The figure now stands at 65%, up from 52% recorded in February 2026. In absolute terms, that translates to an estimated 175.5 million American adults, according to Edison Research at SSRS.

The data was collected on the SSRS Opinion Panel Omnibus between May 14 and 18, 2026, drawing on a nationally representative sample of 1,030 adults aged 18 and older. Comparison figures derive from an earlier wave conducted February 5 to 9, 2026, with a sample of 991 respondents. The margin of error for the May wave is plus or minus 3.6 percentage points at the 95% confidence level. The design effect is 1.4.

AI User Metrics is a subscription research service that fields twice a month, tracking awareness and self-reported usage across all major AI chatbot platforms. The methodology relies on the probability-based SSRS Opinion Panel, which collects data online and via telephone for respondents who are not reachable or willing online, enabling coverage of the full adult population rather than just regular internet users.

The jump of 13 percentage points between February and May represents over 35.6 million additional weekly users. According to Edison Research at SSRS, it is difficult to identify a recent media platform or technology that experienced comparable growth in an equivalent period.

ChatGPT leads, but Gemini records the fastest growth

ChatGPT from OpenAI remains the most widely used AI platform among U.S. adults, with 43% reporting use in the past week as of the May wave. That is up from 36% in February - a gain of seven percentage points over three months.

Google Gemini recorded the most rapid growth of any platform tracked. Its weekly usage share rose from 25% in February to 38% in May, a 13-point increase that represents the sharpest individual-platform climb in the dataset. Gemini had already been demonstrating aggressive year-over-year traffic momentum through the first quarter of 2026, and the survey-based figures from Edison Research now put concrete self-reported usage numbers behind the traffic trend.

Further down the rankings, Microsoft Copilot was used by 17% of adults in the past week, up from 14% in February. Meta AI, also known as Llama, registered 14% weekly usage; it was first added to the tracking instrument on March 10, 2026, at 9% use, so the subsequent rise to 14% reflects its trajectory since entering the panel. Claude AI from Anthropic reached 9% weekly use in May, doubling from 4% in February. DeepSeek moved from 1% to 4%. Grok from xAI edged down slightly, from 7% to 6%.

The share reporting no use of any AI platform in the past week fell from 48% in February to 35% in May, underscoring the breadth of the shift.

Platform awareness rises sharply, led by Claude

Awareness figures also moved upward across the platform landscape. According to Edison Research at SSRS, 97% of U.S. adults have now heard of at least one AI platform, up from 95% in February.

ChatGPT from OpenAI and Gemini from Google retain the highest name recognition - 90% and 85% respectively, up modestly from 88% and 80% in February. Microsoft Copilot is known by 69% of adults, compared with 64% three months earlier.

The strongest proportional gain in awareness belongs to Claude AI from Anthropic, which climbed from 21% in February to 42% in May - doubling in the space of three months. The March 2026 Infinite Dial report from Edison Research at SSRS noted a 58% wave-on-wave increase in Claude awareness between early and mid-February, which it partly attributed to Anthropic's Super Bowl advertising and a contemporaneous public dispute with the U.S. Department of Defense. The May data suggests that awareness spike sustained itself.

Meta AI / Llama was added to the awareness battery on March 10 and already registers 77%. Grok from xAI reached 50%, up from 42%. DeepSeek stands at 34%, up from 25%.

Personal use dominates; business adoption trails but grows

A notable structural characteristic of current AI adoption in the United States is how skewed usage is toward personal rather than professional contexts. According to Edison Research at SSRS, 63% of adults used an AI platform for personal purposes in the week of May 14-18, compared with 33% who used one for business purposes. The personal-use figure has risen substantially from 47% in February; business-use grew more modestly, from 26% to 33%.

The pattern holds at the platform level. Among ChatGPT users, 40% used it for personal purposes versus 19% for business in the May wave - roughly a two-to-one ratio, similar to February's split of 31% personal and 17% business. Gemini shows an even sharper skew: 35% personal use against 13% business, up from 23% and 9% respectively in February.

The sole exception to the pattern is Microsoft Copilot, which sits at 11% personal and 11% business use - an even split that reflects its enterprise-oriented distribution through Microsoft 365 subscriptions.

"AI User Metrics shows that Americans are increasingly incorporating AI into their personal lives," said Megan Lazovick, Vice President, Edison Research at SSRS. "But as the commercial focus shifts to enterprise use, the question of how consumer preferences factor into workplace use remains open."

The gap between personal and business adoption carries direct implications for advertisers and media buyers. Platforms with primarily consumer audiences command different inventory profiles than business-first tools, and the May data shows the consumer orientation of the two dominant platforms deepening as usage grows.

Age, income, and gender segments show uneven adoption

The May 2026 AI User Metrics data includes breakdowns by demographic segment, illuminating which populations are driving and lagging overall growth.

Adults aged 18 to 34 are the most active users: 78% reported using an AI platform in the past week. Among those aged 35 to 54 the figure is 70%. Adults 55 and older register a notably lower 51%, though even this group shows majority adoption - a shift that would have seemed improbable even 18 months ago.

Household income also correlates with usage. Adults with annual incomes of $100,000 or more reported weekly AI use at 71%, against 63% for those earning below that threshold. The eight-point gap suggests that economic access - to premium tiers, business subscriptions, and the professional contexts in which AI tools are most heavily embedded - plays a measurable role in adoption patterns.

Gender differences exist but are narrower. Among men, 70% reported weekly use; among women, 61%. Both figures represent majorities, and the nine-point gap is smaller than the age-based spread, suggesting AI chatbot usage has crossed broadly into mainstream adoption rather than remaining concentrated in a specific demographic.

Methodology and measurement context

The AI User Metrics service from Edison Research at SSRS is structured specifically to produce high-frequency, nationally representative measurements of a population that standard surveys often undercount. The SSRS Opinion Panel Omnibus fields twice monthly, targeting approximately 1,000 adults per wave. Its probability-based design - incorporating random-digit dialing and address-based sampling to recruit panel members - means the data covers non-internet users who would be systematically excluded from purely online research panels.

The integration of over 100 demographic and psychographic variables from the panel's profile data allows subscribers to cut the data across a wide range of audience segments, tracking which populations are accelerating fastest in adoption. Trend data in the series currently extends back to Q1 2026, with the February 2026 wave as the baseline.

The May wave ran from May 14 to 18, the same window as the broader Omnibus. The sample of 1,030 adults represents the full U.S. adult population aged 18 and older. Survey administration used both online and telephone modes.

SSRS completed its acquisition of Edison Research in 2025, bringing together Edison's three-decade legacy in audio, media, and consumer behavior research with SSRS's broader survey infrastructure. The AI User Metrics product sits within what is now described as Edison Research at SSRS's audio, media, and emerging trends practice.

What the figures mean for the advertising and marketing industry

The scale and speed of the adoption figures documented in the May 2026 report carry several concrete implications for professionals working in paid search, programmatic advertising, and marketing strategy.

The first is audience scale. At 175.5 million weekly users, AI chatbots now represent a mainstream media touchpoint for American adults rather than an early-adopter cohort. A survey released by Equativ in October 2025 already documented 67% of consumers across North America and Europe using AI more than once per week, and the Edison Research data now provides a domestic U.S. figure underpinned by a probability-based panel rather than an opt-in sample.

The second implication is platform mix. The gap between ChatGPT's 43% weekly reach and Gemini's 38% is narrower than traffic-based measurements have sometimes suggested. Web analytics from Similarweb published in January 2026 showed ChatGPT holding around 65% of global AI website traffic against Gemini's 22%, but session-based web metrics and self-reported weekly usage ask fundamentally different questions. The Edison Research survey measures whether a person used a platform at all in the past seven days; it does not weight that response by the number of sessions or queries generated. A user who launches Gemini once via a Google Search result may report weekly use, while a ChatGPT power user generates far more sessions per week. The convergence in reach figures between the two platforms therefore tells advertisers something specific: the addressable population reachable through Gemini is now approaching the size of the population reachable through ChatGPT.

Third, the personal-versus-business split matters for ad environment planning. With 63% of adults using AI in personal contexts and only 33% in business contexts, the dominant AI touchpoints in terms of raw population reach are consumer-facing interfaces. Microsoft Copilot's even split between personal and professional use may reflect the platform's embedding in enterprise software stacks, but its overall reach - 17% weekly use - is smaller than both ChatGPT and Gemini.

Fourth, the rapid growth in Claude's awareness - from 21% to 42% in three months - is relevant to any marketer tracking the competitive dynamics of the AI tools their audiences are discovering. Whether sustained awareness translates into durable usage gains remains to be seen in subsequent waves. Claude's weekly usage stands at 9% in the May data, up from 4% in February, suggesting the awareness lift is generating some usage conversion.

The question that Lazovick identified - how consumer habits factor into enterprise AI adoption decisions - is one the advertising industry will encounter increasingly as it considers which platforms to target, which creatives to optimize for AI-mediated discovery, and how to measure the effectiveness of campaigns reaching audiences who are simultaneously using AI tools to research, filter, and decide.

For practitioners watching AI-driven search behavior, a Q1 2026 analysis from Datos found that AI tools still account for under 2% of total desktop search events in the United States, despite the scale of self-reported chatbot usage documented by Edison Research. The gap between frequency of casual AI conversation and actual redirection of search queries away from traditional engines remains wide - but the base of users who could, in principle, shift more of their information-seeking into AI interfaces has now reached two-thirds of the American adult population.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Edison Research at SSRS, a research operation formed when SSRS acquired Edison Research in 2025. The May 2026 report was prepared by Christopher Jackson and Megan Lazovick of SSRS.

What: The May 2026 AI User Metrics Report documents that 65% of American adults - approximately 175.5 million people - used at least one AI platform in the week of May 14-18, 2026. This is up from 52% in February 2026, an increase of more than 35.6 million weekly users in three months. ChatGPT leads with 43% weekly reach; Gemini recorded the fastest growth, rising from 25% to 38%. Claude's awareness doubled from 21% to 42% over the same period. Personal use (63%) outnumbers business use (33%) by roughly two to one.

When: The survey fieldwork ran from May 14 to 18, 2026. The report was published and distributed on May 27, 2026.

Where: The findings cover the United States adult population aged 18 and older. Data was collected via the SSRS Opinion Panel Omnibus, combining online and telephone interviewing to produce a nationally representative sample.

Why: AI User Metrics is an ongoing subscription tracking service designed to provide high-frequency, probability-based measurements of AI platform awareness and usage across the full U.S. adult population - a measurement gap that monthly or annual surveys cannot fill given the pace at which platform dynamics are shifting.

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