Philippine internet users 16 and older use AI at 94.4% rate

Meltwater and We Are Social’s Digital 2027 report, covered by Rappler on Oct. 23, put monthly AI-tool use at 94.4% among online Filipinos 16 and older.

The same October report said 5.5% of Philippine online users 16 and older paid monthly for an AI-tool subscription. The 88.9 percentage-point gap, according to Atlas360 calculations, points to wide use but limited paid uptake.

The report, which Rappler described as more than 900 pages, covers digital behavior worldwide, including artificial intelligence, mobile phones, social media and web browsing. It is paired with detailed reports by author Simon Kemp on parts of the data.

For the Philippines, the report put the population at 118 million, up 936,000 from a year earlier. It counted 95.9 million internet users, equal to 81.3% of the population, and 94.7 million social-media user identities, down by about 1.1 million.

Mobile access remains larger than the population count. The report cited 149 million cellular phone connections in the Philippines, equal to 126% of the country’s population, a level that can reflect people using more than one connection.

The report said 71.17% of active Philippine AI users 16 and older used AI tools to find information. It put the share seeking advice on problems at 37.6%, and the share using the tools for personalized recommendations at 32.8%.

The social assessment was less expansive than the usage figure. The report said 27.5% of Philippine online users 16 and older believed AI benefited society overall.

Globally, the report said 38.9% of the world’s 8.32 billion people, or about 3.24 billion, used generative AI tools each month. Generative artificial intelligence refers to software that produces content, such as text or images, from prompts.

That global figure was up by about 1.2 billion users, according to the report. It cautioned that duplication may affect the count because a person may hold more than one account, including separate personal and work accounts.

The report also tracked a decline in browser-based activity. It said monthly traffic across the world’s top 10,000 web domains dropped by more than 10% since ChatGPT launched in 2022, falling by almost 50 billion visits per month between the fourth quarter of 2022 and the second quarter of 2026.

Time spent on those domains fell 11.2% over a two-year period, a decline the report equated with more than 6.6 billion hours per month. The report did not establish that AI caused the decline and said wider use of native mobile apps may also be drawing activity away from browsers.

The browser data was not uniformly negative. The report said users loaded just under 3 trillion pages per month across the top 10,000 domains in the second quarter of 2026, up more than 2% from the same period in 2024.