More than a third of the world’s population now uses generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools every month, while social media has reached nearly 70 percent of people worldwide, shifting online activity away from the traditional web, according to the latest global digital trends report.
The Digital 2027 report, released on Wednesday by creative agency We Are Social and media intelligence firm Meltwater, estimated that active users of generative AI tools have climbed to 3.24 billion, or 38.9 percent of the global population. That is an increase of 57.2 percent in the past 12 months, or 1.2 billion new users.
ChatGPT remains the leader in the generative AI market, with twice as many monthly active users as its nearest rival.
However, the report said rivals, such as Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude, are gaining ground. Active users of Gemini’s mobile app quadrupled over the past year, and its web user base is now more than 60 percent the size of ChatGPT’s.
Social media user interest will continue to grow. Statistics showed the addition of 151 million new identities, equivalent to 6.9 percent of the global population.
People are also spending more time on these platforms. The typical internet user increased time spent on social media and online video platforms by 3.8 percent over the past year, to an average of 19 hours and 18 minutes per week.
YouTube captured the largest share of total global social media time, followed closely by WhatsApp and Instagram. TikTok, however, led in average time spent per active user, at 1 hour and 55 minutes per day.
The report found that social platforms remain central to shopping decisions among young consumers, with 46.9 percent of internet users aged 16 to 24 relying on platforms such as Instagram and Facebook as their primary source of information when researching brands and potential purchases.
The report also found that the growth of AI and native mobile apps is cutting into traditional web use. Across the world’s top 10,000 web domains, total monthly traffic has declined by more than 10 percent since ChatGPT’s public launch, and total time spent on the web has fallen 11.2 percent in just the past 24 months.
Search engines, however, still hold an edge in brand discovery. Online adults remain 74 percent more likely to say they turn to search engines when researching brands than to an AI platform. The report noted that AI is not the only factor reshaping web behavior.
‘AI is changing how people discover brands, but social remains central to where people spend their time and form preferences. The conversations, recommendations and opinions people make, share online are increasingly informing the answers AI gives and the decisions people make,’ said Suzie Shaw, CEO of We Are Social Asia-Pacific (APAC).
‘For brands, that changes the game. You can optimize what you publish, but you don’t control what people say about you,’ Shaw added. ‘The brands that win won’t just be the ones that appear in AI-generated answers, but the ones people are genuinely interested in, talking about and recommending in the first place.’
Internet users globally now total 5.61 billion, or 73.9 percent of the world’s population. The typical online adult uses an average of 5.8 different channels to discover new brands.
Given this, advertisers are following audiences online. Digital ad spending rose 8.7 percent over the past year, with spending on social media advertising up 18 percent and influencer advertising up 15 percent.
Mimrah Mahmood, Meltwater’s APAC VP of enterprise sales, said brands in the region can no longer depend on a single platform given how widely digital habits differ across markets.
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‘With generative AI adoption surging nearly 60 percent in the last year, the customer journey is being rewritten in real time, changing how people discover information and evaluate brands,’ Mahmood said.
He said marketers and communicators must move away from tracking channels in isolation and instead understand their total brand presence across news, social media, search and AI-powered platforms.
‘Because cultural context and language heavily shape how APAC audiences perceive brands, bringing together media, social, and AI intelligence is now essential for teams to spot emerging shifts and focus their efforts where it actually moves the needle,’ he said.
The 900-page report draws on data from GWI, Similarweb and Statista, among other sources.
In a lighter finding, it noted that cats continue to edge out dogs online, with Google searches returning 4.15 billion results for cats against 4.02 billion for dogs at the end of 2026.