How small businesses are adopting, trusting, and harnessing AI in 2026
Online survery and interviews with 350 US-based business owners
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FOREWORD
We believe the new era of AI offers an extraordinary opportunity for small businesses to succeed online without the resource constraints that previously held many back. We set out to understand where confidence with AI stands today and what small businesses need most.
We partnered with ListenLabs to interview 350 small business owners across every level of AI experience and asked them about adoption, mastery, trust, ROI, AI search visibility, and the agentic AI wave on the horizon. We learned a lot.
A year ago, the small business AI story was purely about adoption. That is no longer the conversation. Today, 87% of small businesses use at least one AI tool, and a majority pay for one. But adoption has outpaced understanding with only 20% describing themselves as highly confident using AI. Most compelling to us was seeing the direct correlation between an owner’s self-rated AI confidence and their reported revenue growth, with those claiming mastery seeing nearly 5X revenue impact.
The majority of business owners not yet experiencing AI-accelerated growth were eager to know what to use, when to trust it, and how to make it actually work for their business.
The State of Small Business AI Confidence 2026 marks our first annual report. Given that SMBs account for 99.9% of all American businesses, employ roughly 45.9% of the private-sector workforce, and generate approximately 43.5% of the total U.S. GDP, the potential positive impact of AI on SMBs could be true tail wind for the American economy. We look forward to seeing how SMB AI adoption and confidence shifts between now and through 2027.
Sincerely,
Sachin Puri
Chief Executive Officer, Bluehost
Six chapters that cover the full arc of small business AI in 2026 — from adoption and confidence to the agentic wave on the horizon.
Six chapters that cover the full arc of small business AI in 2026 — from adoption and confidence to the agentic wave on the horizon.
Thank You!
Your information has been submitted. You will be hearing from us soon!
By submitting your information you expressly consent to receive phone communications, which may be promotional in nature from Bluehost or from our family of brands via residential, or mobile number, including text messages, (that may be autodialed or pre-recorded calls) to the contact information submitted. I understand that calls may be recorded and I can withdraw my consent at any time. You're not required to give your consent as a condition of making a purchase. Additional information can be found in our Terms of Service & Privacy Notice.
ChatGPT, 
Claude, 
Gemini, 
Grok — all four for 