AI Overviews (SGE)
statistics 2026

Why the measurements differ

BrightEdge measures the queries its clients track, Semrush a broad set of more than 10 million keywords, Ahrefs a random sample of US desktop results pages and Pew the real searches of 900 US adults. That is why the share of queries with an AI Overview ranges from 15% to 48%: compare the measurement, not just the percentage.

Which queries trigger an AI Overview?

• Only 8% of one- or two-word searches produced an AI summary, versus 53% of searches with 10 or more words (US, March 2025) (Pew Research Center, 2025)
• 60% of searches starting with a question word (who, what, when, why) produced an AI summary, and 36% of searches containing both a noun and a verb (Pew Research Center, 2025)
• In Seer's dataset of 53 brands, AI Overviews appeared for 36% of informational, 8% of commercial and 5% of transactional queries (January 2025 to February 2026) (Seer Interactive, 2026)
• By query format: 95.4% of comparison queries (267 of 280), 85.9% of question-format queries and 27.3% of single-word queries showed an AI Overview in the same dataset (Seer Interactive, 2026)
• AI Overviews are moving beyond pure information: informational queries made up 91.3% of AIO-triggering queries in January 2025 and 57.1% in October, while the commercial share grew to 18.57% and the transactional share to 13.94% (Semrush, 2025)
• Nearly 60% of keywords with an AI Overview have 100 or fewer monthly searches: long, specific queries (Semrush, 2025)

Which queries don't trigger an AI Overview?

• About 52% of BrightEdge's tracked queries still showed no AI Overview at all in February 2026 (BrightEdge, 2026)
• The lowest saturation was in Real Estate, Shopping and Arts & Entertainment, each under 3% of keywords, while Science (25.96%), Computers & Electronics (17.92%) and People & Society (17.29%) were highest (November 2025) (Semrush, 2025)
• Transactional queries show the fewest AI Overviews in Seer's data: 5%, against 36% for informational queries (Seer Interactive, 2026)

Curious about the broader search landscape? Check out our full overview of search engine market share statistics. For Dutch companies, how to become visible in AI answers: read more about visibility in AI answers (in Dutch).

Which pages get cited?

• In Ahrefs' analysis of 863,000 SERPs and 4 million cited URLs, 37.9% of cited URLs appeared in the top 10, 31.2% in positions 11 to 100 and 31.0% beyond the top 100 (Ahrefs, 2026)
• BrightEdge measures an even smaller overlap: only about 17% of sources cited in AI Overviews also rank in the organic top 10, while overlap with the top 100 rose from 48.7% to 53.1% (February to July 2025) (BrightEdge, 2026)
• The overlap differs by sector: highest for healthcare (24.0%), education (23.1%) and B2B tech (22.6%), lowest for restaurants (9.3%), where 76.0% of cited sources don't rank in the top 100 (BrightEdge, 2026)
• Google explains why: AI Overviews and AI Mode may use query fan-out, issuing multiple related searches across subtopics and data sources, so they can show a wider set of links than a classic search (Google Search Central, 2026)

Which types of sources?

• .gov websites made up 6% of AI summary sources, versus 2% of sources in standard results; news sites made up 5% in both (Pew Research Center, 2025)
• Wikipedia, YouTube and Reddit together accounted for 15% of sources in AI summaries and 17% in standard results (Pew Research Center, 2025)
• YouTube made up 5.6% of all cited URLs, and 18.2% of the cited URLs that don't rank in the top 100 (Ahrefs, 2026)

What being cited is worth

• On informational queries in 2025, cited brands had an average organic CTR of 2.07%, brands not cited 0.94% and results without an AI Overview 3.35% (Seer Interactive, 2026)
• Per million impressions that is about 33,500 clicks without an AI Overview, 20,743 when cited and 9,445 when not cited: being cited helps, but still means 38% fewer clicks than no AI Overview (Seer Interactive, 2026)
• Paid CTR follows the same pattern: 15.74% for cited brands, 11.19% for brands not cited and 19.75% without an AI Overview (Seer Interactive, 2026)
• Seer stresses the data is correlational: higher-authority brands are more likely to be cited in the first place (Seer Interactive, 2026)

What drives brand visibility in AI answers

• In a study of 75,000 brands, YouTube mentions correlated most strongly with visibility in AI answers (about 0.737), followed by branded web mentions and branded anchors; Domain Rating and the number of pages on a site correlated much more weakly (Ahrefs, 2025)

What Google says

• There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode: a page has to be indexed and eligible to show in Search with a snippet (Google Search Central, 2026)
• There is no special schema.org structured data you need to add; Google does recommend making sure your structured data matches the visible text on the page (Google Search Central, 2026)
• Traffic from AI features is included in the overall search traffic in Search Console, under the Web search type of the Performance report (Google Search Central, 2026)
• To limit what is shown from your pages, Google points to the nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet and noindex controls (Google Search Central, 2026)

Practical optimization checklist

Based on the verified data above, these are the steps with the clearest basis: 1. Answer the question directly in the first sentences, because question-style and long queries trigger AI Overviews most often. 2. Cover the subtopics around a question, since query fan-out pulls sources from related searches, not only from the top 10. 3. Keep structured data accurate and in line with the visible text instead of adding markup in the hope of a citation. 4. Build mentions of your brand elsewhere on the web and on YouTube, the factors that correlate most with AI visibility. 5. Measure: track impressions and clicks per query in Search Console, because impressions can rise while clicks fall.

Where AI Overviews are heading

• Google is building one seamless experience across AI Overviews, AI Mode and traditional Search, and reports its highest year-over-year query growth in five years (Q3 2026) (Alphabet, 2026)
• AI Overviews drove over 10% more queries globally for the types of queries that show them (Q2 2025) (Alphabet, 2025)
• Presence appears to be levelling off: in BrightEdge's data AI Overviews have hovered between 44% and 48% of tracked queries every month since August 2025 (BrightEdge, 2026)
• Growth is not linear: in Semrush's keyword set the share peaked at 24.61% in July 2025 and fell back to 15.69% in November (Semrush, 2025)
• The click penalty grew from 34.5% (March 2025) to 58% (December 2025) in Ahrefs' repeated measurement (Ahrefs, 2026)

What does this mean for your SEO strategy?

The data points to three shifts. From ranking to citation: a top-10 position no longer guarantees a citation, and pages outside the top 100 do get cited, so content has to answer the full question and its subtopics. From traffic to visibility: impressions rise while clicks fall, so measure visibility and the value of each visit, not just sessions. From generic to recognizable: mentions of your brand elsewhere on the web and on YouTube correlate more strongly with AI visibility than the size of your site. The businesses that adapt now are building an advantage that will be hard to catch up to once AI Overviews become the new normal.