Digital marketing statistics are the numbers that show how much is invested in online channels, how people use them and what they return. For the UK, the figure to start from in 2026 is this one: digital advertising was worth £40.5bn in 2025, 10% more than in 2024, according to IAB UK's Digital Adspend study, produced with Oliver Wyman. IAB UK expects £44.7bn in 2026.
The trouble with the round-ups you find online is something else. Most of them line up global or American percentages without saying so, and often without a year. On Google UK's first page for this search, checked on 10 October 2026, the AI Overview opens with a global figure (ad spend passing $1 trillion), Shopify's page was last updated in October 2024 and quotes 2023 data, and ActiveCampaign's list dates from September 2021. Here every number comes with the market it was measured in, the year and a link to the organisation that produced it. Where only an American figure exists I say so, and explain why it shouldn't be copied into a UK marketing plan.
Digital marketing in the UK in 2026, in 14 numbers
The table brings together the most recent UK figures with a primary source. The 2026 advertising figure is IAB UK's forecast, published in March 2026; the retail figures are the ONS release of 18 September 2026.
| Figure | Value | Year | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Digital advertising spend | £40.5bn (+10%) | 2025 | IAB UK Digital Adspend |
| Digital advertising spend, forecast | £44.7bn (+10.3%) | 2026, forecast | IAB UK Digital Adspend |
| Online formats' share of total UK adspend | 83.3% | H1 2025 | AA/WARC Expenditure Report |
| Share of adults' online time spent on Alphabet and Meta services | 51% | May 2025 | Ofcom Online Nation 2025 |
| Online video advertising | £9.3bn (+20%), 23% of digital adspend | 2025 | IAB UK Digital Adspend |
| Search advertising | £17.9bn (+6%), 44% of digital adspend | 2025 | IAB UK Digital Adspend |
| Online share of retail sales | 28.8% | August 2026 | ONS, Retail sales |
| Growth in online retail sales value | +10.1% (three months to August, year on year) | 2026 | ONS, Retail sales |
| Adults (18+) online | 49.1 million | May 2025 | Ofcom Online Nation 2025 (Ipsos iris) |
| Google's share of search engines | 91.39% | September 2026 | StatCounter |
| Businesses (10+ employees) using at least one AI technology | 35% (about 12% in late 2023) | June 2026 | ONS, AI in UK businesses |
| SME employers selling to customers online | 23% | 2024 | DBT, Longitudinal Small Business Survey |
| People aged 16+ with internet access at home | 95% | 2025 | Ofcom Online Nation 2025 |
| Adults with the Essential Digital Skills for life | 92% | 2025 | Lloyds Essential Digital Skills 2025 (Ipsos) |
If you need the numbers for a single channel, there are dedicated pages: SEO statistics, Google Ads statistics and content marketing statistics, all with the same rule on sources.
Online advertising: where the £40.5bn goes
The whole UK advertising market was worth £46.7bn in 2025, up 6.4%, according to the AA/WARC Expenditure Report published in April 2026. Online formats took 83.3% of it in the first half of 2025. The digital market is concentrated in a different way from the one the spend figures show: Ofcom's Online Nation 2025 found that Alphabet and Meta services account for 51% of the time UK adults spend online. That's attention, not money, but it's where most of the £40.5bn ends up.
The fastest-growing formats are video and social. Online video was worth £9.3bn in 2025 (+20%), 23% of digital adspend, and TV+ (advertising on broadcasters' streaming services and connected TV) made up 34% of that. Social reached £11.5bn (+21%), and 59% of social spend now goes on video. Search is still the largest item at £17.9bn, 44% of the total, but it grew 6%, below the market average of 10%. Retail media reached £3.8bn (+18%), according to the IAB UK figures published in March 2026.
Two comparisons with other markets help to read these numbers, as long as you don't mistake them for UK data:
- worldwide, digital will take 68.7% of advertising spend in 2026, out of a total that passes $1 trillion for the first time (+5.1%), according to Dentsu's December 2025 forecast. The UK, at 83.3% online in the first half of 2025, is well ahead of the global average, even allowing for the fact that the years and methods don't match;
- in the United States search accounts for 38.8% of digital advertising ($114.2bn out of $294.6bn, 2025 figures from the IAB/PwC report). In the UK the same item is 44% (IAB UK, 2025). Anyone who copies American benchmarks on the weight of search underestimates the channel in the UK by about five points.
Within that 44% for paid search, the price of a click varies enormously from sector to sector. In our own checks on 12 typical small business searches on Google UK (Keyword Planner data via DataForSEO, October 2026), the average CPC runs from £1.91 (house renovation london) to £35.90 (divorce solicitor london), and the cost of an enquiry ranges accordingly from about £38 to over £700. CPCs are converted from US dollars at the Bank of England rate of 8 October 2026 ($1.3226 = £1). The full table is in our guide to Google Ads for small businesses.
Search: Google holds 91%, but clicks are changing
In September 2026 Google had 91.39% of searches made in the UK across all devices, according to StatCounter. Bing follows with 6.08%, then Yahoo with 1.32%, DuckDuckGo with 0.65% and Ecosia with 0.30%. For a UK business, then, "doing SEO" still means almost entirely ranking on Google; the alternative search engines together don't reach 9%.
What has changed is the results page. Google brought AI Overviews to the UK in August 2024, after a test that started in April, and AI Mode arrived on 28 July 2025. In the announcement, Hema Budaraju, Vice President of Product Management for Search, writes that early users ask questions two or three times longer than a traditional search. If you want to know how it works, see our guide to Google AI Mode.
On the effect of AI summaries on clicks, the most quoted figure is American. The Pew Research Center tracked the browsing of 900 US adults in March 2025, across 68,879 Google searches: when an AI summary appeared, users clicked a traditional result in 8% of visits, against 15% without a summary. Links inside the summary were clicked in 1% of cases. The summary appeared in 18% of searches.
The UK has one study of its own, with a narrower scope. Authoritas looked at 3,500 search terms linked to stories by UK news publishers in April 2025 and, using Search Console data, found that click-through rate fell by 47.5% on desktop and 37.7% on mobile when an AI Overview appeared (Press Gazette). The study was submitted to the Competition and Markets Authority, and Google called it inaccurate. It covers news queries only, so it says little about a plumber or a machinery manufacturer. Ofcom puts the share of keyword searches that show an AI overview at around 30%. AI Overviews and zero-click searches are real in the UK too; how much they cost you has to be measured on your own site.
E-commerce: 28.8% of retail sales are now online
In August 2026 online sales were 28.8% of all retail sales in Great Britain, up from 28.4% in July, according to the ONS retail sales release of 18 September 2026. The average for 2025 was 27.5% (ONS series J4MC). In the three months to August, the value of online sales was 10.1% higher than a year earlier.
The more interesting number is the comparison. Over the same three months, total retail sales volumes grew by 2.4% year on year. Value and volume aren't the same measure, but the gap is wide enough to show that online is taking share from shops rather than growing alongside them. Meanwhile the share of small and medium-sized employers that sell to customers online fell to 23% in 2024, four points down on 2023, according to the Longitudinal Small Business Survey. More money online, fewer small sellers: for anyone selling online it means the game is played on winning share from the competitors already there and on conversion rate, more than on new audiences.
The ONS linked a dip in online sales in July to promotions brought forward into June. For how organic visibility is built for an online shop, starting from category pages, see our guide to ecommerce SEO.
Businesses: AI use has tripled, online selling hasn't
According to the ONS article on AI in UK businesses, published on 20 July 2026, 35% of UK businesses with 10 or more employees used at least one AI technology in June 2026. In September and October 2023 it was about 12%: the figure has roughly tripled in under three years. Among firms with 250 or more employees it reaches 49%; among those with up to 9 employees it's 28%. The data comes from the Business Insights and Conditions Survey (BICS), with 38,637 responses.
The EU average, measured differently, is lower. Eurostat records 19.95% of enterprises using AI across the Union in 2025, with Denmark top at 42.03%. It also names marketing and sales as the first area of use: 34.7% of European enterprises that use AI apply it there. The ONS doesn't publish a marketing-specific figure for the UK. How marketing teams are using it, with real examples, is covered in our article on AI marketing and in the round-up of AI marketing statistics.
The other figures on small firms describe a slower picture. In 2024, 69% of SME employers used technology or web-based software to sell or to run the business, up from 50% in 2022, but most of that is accountancy software (80% of users) and electronic invoicing (62%). Only 23% sold to customers online. Micro businesses lag behind, at 67% against 81% for medium-sized firms. For a small business the realistic starting point is almost always the website and local search, as I explain in the guide to small business marketing.
People: 95% are online, and one in seven lacks the basics
Ofcom's Online Nation 2025, published in December 2025, finds that 95% of people aged 16 and over have internet access at home. UK adults spend an average of 4 hours 30 minutes a day online for personal use, ten minutes more than in 2024. Among 18 to 24-year-olds it's 6 hours 20 minutes; among the over-65s, 3 hours 20 minutes.
Access isn't the same as skills. The Lloyds Essential Digital Skills 2025 survey (4,175 adults, interviewed by Ipsos in March and April 2025) finds that 92% have the skills needed for everyday life, but only 85% reach the foundation level, so about one adult in seven doesn't. For anyone designing a website or a funnel, the consequence is practical: long forms, compulsory registration and unexplained steps are the first places where that audience gives up. Before importing an American conversion benchmark, remember that it was measured on a different audience.
Budgets and AI in marketing teams: the surveys and their scope
On budgets there's no UK official survey, so two private sources do the rounds. Use them knowing who they asked.
- Gartner's 2026 CMO Spend Survey reports a marketing budget of 7.8% of revenue (7.7% in 2025), with 15.3% of that budget going on AI. Only 30% of marketing leaders say they have mature capabilities to use it. The sample: 401 CMOs in North America, the UK and Europe, interviewed between January and March 2026, mostly at companies with more than $1bn in revenue. It isn't a benchmark for a UK business turning over £5m.
- HubSpot's State of Marketing (more than 3,400 marketers, global sample) reports that more than 80% use AI to create content. Useful for seeing the direction of travel, not much use for setting a budget.
For a small business the sensible approach starts from its own numbers, not from a percentage of revenue taken from a different scale. Two examples from our projects in Italy, both already published: Contesini Consulenze, which runs two energy advice offices in the province of Mantua, got 299 leads in 7 months at €7.20 each, spending about €300 a month; Macropix, an LED screen manufacturer in Milan, went from position 88 to position 2 on a commercial keyword through SEO, as described in the guide to SEO for manufacturing. Before deciding how much to spend on SEO, it's worth doing the sums described in is SEO worth it?.
The American numbers doing the rounds in the UK, and what to do with them
This table takes the statistics that turn up most often in English-language round-ups and puts them back in context.
| The number that circulates | Where it really comes from | Does it apply to the UK? |
|---|---|---|
| "SEO returns 8 times, PPC 4" | SeoProfy attributes it to an NP Digital poll published on LinkedIn, with no link to the original research | No: the method can't be checked |
| "Search is 40.9% of digital advertising" | Global Industry Analysts, worldwide market | No: in the UK search is 44% (IAB UK, 2025) |
| "Digital is 68.7% of ad spend" | Dentsu, global forecast for 2026 | No: in the UK online formats are 83.3% (AA/WARC, H1 2025) |
| "With AI summaries clicks drop from 15% to 8%" | Pew Research, 900 US adults, March 2025 | Not verified: the only UK study (Authoritas) covers news searches |
| "Marketing is 7.8% of revenue" | Gartner, 401 CMOs at large companies in North America, the UK and Europe | Only for large companies |
| "Search is worth $114bn" | IAB/PwC, United States, 2025 | No: US digital advertising ($294.6bn) is more than five times the UK's £40.5bn |
Our rule is simple: an American number goes into a presentation only with "United States" written next to it, and only if there's no UK figure for the same thing. For the share of search, the weight of digital and e-commerce, the UK figure exists, and that's the one to use.
Digital marketing statistics: frequently asked questions
It depends on what you measure. Digital advertising was worth £40.5bn in 2025 and IAB UK forecasts £44.7bn for 2026. Online sales were 28.8% of retail sales in August 2026, according to the ONS. There is no single figure that adds up advertising, services and tools.
£17.9bn in 2025, up 6%, according to IAB UK. That is 44% of all digital advertising, the largest single format, although video and social are growing faster.
35% of businesses with 10 or more employees in June 2026, according to the ONS Business Insights and Conditions Survey. In late 2023 it was about 12%. The EU average measured by Eurostat for 2025 is 19.95%, with a different method.
No. The market differs in size, channel mix and habits: in the United States search is 38.8% of digital advertising, in the UK 44%. An American figure should always be labelled as such and replaced with the UK one where it exists.
Google, with 91.39% of searches in September 2026 according to StatCounter. Bing is at 6.08%, Yahoo at 1.32%.
The number nobody publishes is already in your Search Console
Every source quoted here measures a whole market. None of them tells you how many clicks your site has lost since AI Overviews and AI Mode arrived in the UK, and no public study will tell you. That figure does exist, though: it's the comparison of impressions and CTR for your informational queries before and after August 2024, inside Google Search Console. It's the only digital marketing statistic that really applies to your business. If you'd like to read it with us and work out what to do about it across SEO and Google Ads, that's where we'll start.
