This study was originally published in March 2025. We’ve since refreshed the study with fresher data.
When Google rolled out AI Overviews (AIOs), it was arguably the most disruptive change to the search landscape since the introduction of featured snippets.
Our deep-dive analysis, based on tens of thousands of keywords, SERP feature overlaps, and industry-specific visibility shifts, reveals how and where Google is changing the rules—and what SEOs, publishers, and marketers need to do about it.
We analyzed 10M+ keywords from the Semrush database and clickstream data from Datos to find answers to these questions:
- How many queries trigger AI Overviews overall?
- What kinds of queries are triggering AI Overviews?
- Which industries have been most impacted by AI Overviews so far?
- Are AI Overviews driving more zero-click searches?
Here’s what we found:
Key Takeaways & Stats
- Volatile growth: AI Overviews peaked in mid-summer, then declined. After starting the year at appearing for 6.49% of keywords in January 2025, the share rose to nearly 25% in July before sliding down to 15.69% in November 2025.
- Surprising zero-click behavior: AI Overviews show up more often for searches that tend to get no clicks. But when we looked at the same search terms before the AIO was there and after, we found people actually clicked slightly more with the AIO. Also, the overall zero-click rate of keywords with AI Overviews has slowly declined since January 2025.
- Beyond informational search: In January, 91.3% of queries that trigger an AI Overview were informational. By October, that share was down to 57.1%, and the share of commercial and transactional AIOs rose.
- More navigational queries: The number of navigational searches that trigger AI Overviews has skyrocketed—from 0.74% in January to 10.33% in October.
- Industry differences: The industries with the most AI Overviews in November wereScience (25.96%), Computers & Electronics (17.92%), and People & Society (17.29%).
- Food & drink summaries on the rise: Since March, this category saw the highest increase in AI Overviews (+7.25%).
Why Should You Care about AI Overviews?
You should care about AI Overviews because they’re AI-generated summaries in Google Search results that:
- Appear above organic results
- Reduce the need for users to click through to websites
- May cannibalize traffic from publishers, ecommerce platforms, affiliates, and content marketers
AI Overviews are built on Google's generative AI models and deliver an instant synthesis of multiple relevant sources pulled from the web.
Unlike featured snippets, which extract a sentence or two from a single source, AI Overviews consolidate knowledge from multiple sources to present a unified answer.
In short: they’re turning Google into both a search engine and an answer engine.
Methodology of the Study
To understand the impact and scope of AI Overviews, we analyzed:
- 10M+ keywords to find the share of queries triggering AI Overviews and monthly changes in AI Overviews by intent type
- 10K keywords to define keyword length, keyword difficulty levels, search volume levels, and SERP feature co-occurrence with AI Overviews
- 200K+ keywords to define zero-click rate trends from Jan 2025 to October 2025
- 11K domains to understand visibility and impact by industry
This allowed us to observe what kinds of content AI Overviews appear for, how that’s changing over time, and what SEO strategies are still effective.
What Percentage of Queries Are Triggering AI Overviews?
We looked at 10M+ keywords from January 2025 through November 2025 to find the percentage of all queries that trigger an AI Overview.
And the data shows terms that trigger AI Overviews grew rapidly at the start of 2025 before settling in at around 16% of all queries.
- AI Overviews were triggered for 6.49% of queries in January
- AI Overviews were triggered for 24.61% of queries in July
- AI Overviews were triggered for 15.69% of queries in November
What Kinds of Queries Are Triggering AI Overviews?
In our first iteration of this study back in March 2025, these were the top-level metrics for keywords that trigger AI Overviews:
Now, the average keyword with an AI Overview looks slightly different: more search volume, a higher average CPC, and lower difficulty.
Earlier in 2025, AI Overviews mostly appeared for long-tail informational queries—not high-volume commercial or transactional keywords. This was consistent with how Google previously rolled our featured snippets and People Also Ask.
So, the question is: was Google just testing AI Overviews in low-risk areas before expanding them to more queries?
We analyzed 10M+ keywords to define how the search intent of queries that trigger an AI Overview has changed over time for clues.
Search Intent of Keywords That Trigger an AI Overview
The data shows that AI Overviews are slowly but surely starting to target lower-funnel searches.
Since October 2024, the percentage of keywords triggering an AI Overview with commercial, transactional, or navigational intent have all grown:
- Commercial queries: up from 8.15% to 18.57%
- Transactional queries: up from 1.98% to 13.94%
- Navigational queries: up from 0.84% to 10.33%
What This Tells Us
- There’s been a significant increase in the number of middle-of-the-funnel and bottom-of-the-funnel terms that trigger AI Overviews
- Top-of-the-funnel, informational searches still have the highest share of AI Overviews
- Navigational AI Overviews are skyrocketing—a signal that even branded traffic is at risk
We’re seeing the net cast by AI Overviews widen. The special feature is now growing across more types of keywords, whether they’re branded, navigational, or commercial in nature
Length of Queries that Trigger AI Overviews
We analyzed the structure and length of keywords that trigger AI Overviews and those that don’t trigger AI Overviews and saw some notable differences.
Keywords that trigger AI Overviews tend to be longer and more specific.
These kinds of queries have been the cornerstone of most SEO content strategies for years. Now, brands have to compete against AI Overviews to earn attention—and clicks—in SERPs.
What This Tells Us
Google prefers predictable, fact-based questions where it can confidently summarize a consensus answer.
Difficulty, CPC, and Volume of Keywords that Trigger AI Overviews
Next, we evaluated three main keyword metrics for terms that trigger AI Overviews compared to terms that don’t trigger AI Overviews.
AI Overviews are showing up most often on low-CPC, low-volume queries—with nearly 60% of keywords having 100 or fewer monthly searches. And a significant share—nearly 60%—falling into the 21–60 Keyword Difficulty range.
What This Tells Us
The majority of AI Overviews still appear on queries that offer little direct ad revenue (informational keywords with low CPC and volume). However, the data shows AI Overviews are moving past low-risk, long-tail queries and into competitive, middle- and bottom-of-the-funnel territory.
SERP Feature Overlap with AI Overviews
We next examined which features most often sit next to AI Overviews in SERPs. In March, this is what we saw:
Many of the most prominent SERP features from March are no longer seen as often with AIOs.
Notably, we don’t see organic videos as much (although video carousels grew). Featured snippets, image carousels, and organic reviews are all now seen less often when an AIO appears.
Related searches (95.32%) and People Also Ask (90.03%) are virtually guaranteed to appear alongside an AI Overview. Also prominent are video carousels and discussion and forum blocks.
Perhaps the most significant insight is the increased presence of Google Ads. When this research was first conducted in March 2025, ads were seen very rarely on the same SERP as an AI Overview.
Now, Google Ads appearing at the bottom occurs on 25% of AIO SERPs. That was less than 1% in March.
What This Tells Us
- AI Overviews are being layered on top of existing formats rather than replacing them—at least for now
- Video carousels and discussion and forum blocks typically feature YouTube and Reddit, so having a brand presence on those platforms could become more important for search visibility
- Google Ads are now being paired with AI Overviews, making the search experience less “organic” and more covered by AI + ads
Zero-Click Behavior: The Biggest SEO KPI Shift
To find out if AI Overviews are stealing clicks from organic search results, Semrush partnered with Datos, a Semrush company, to analyze over 200,000 keywords (each with a search volume over 100) that either triggered or didn’t trigger an AI Overview between January 2025 and October 2025.
To understand causality, we also tracked a set of keywords that did not trigger AI Overviews in May but did in October. This allowed us to directly compare zero-click behavior before and after an AI Overview was introduced for the same keyword.
Keywords that trigger AI Overviews do tend to have higher zero-click rates on average, but this may reflect that those terms often have informational intent rather than indicating causation.
Although keywords with AI Overviews have higher zero-click rates, the rate isn’t rising. In fact, it’s decreased steadily since January. This challenges the assumption that AI Overviews always reduce clicks and points to a more complex interaction between query type, user intent, and how AI answers are delivered.
The reduction in zero-click rates is also likely related to the growth of AI Overviews among transactional and navigational searches.
When we analyzed the same keywords before and after they started showing AI Overviews, we found the zero-click rate decreased from 33.75% to 31.53%.
That suggests AI Overviews don’t automatically increase zero-click behavior.Maybe the reality is that these searches were already unlikely to end in a click.
Which Industries Are Most Affected By AI Overviews?
To determine which industries have been most affected by AI Overviews, we focused on three key metrics:
AI Overview Saturation by Industry
We looked into what percentage of an industry's keywords currently display an AI Overview. Basically, how saturated the industry is with AI Overviews.
The industries most saturated by AI Overviews are Science, Computers & Electronics, and People & Society, all with AIOs on over 17% of keywords.
The industries with the least percentage of AIOs were Real Estate, Shopping, and Arts & Entertainment, with AIOs on less than 3% of all keywords.
AI Overview Expansion Rate by Industry
Then, we looked at the growth in the number of keywords triggering AI Overviews across different industries from March 2025 (when we first published this study) to November 2025.
Some industries saw more AI Overviews while others saw a scaling back:
The industry with the fastest growth was Food & Drink, which is now the ninth-most impacted industry in our list.
Health and People & Society experienced the greatest decreases in share of AI Overviews.
Keyword Ranking Disruptions from AI Overviews
Next we looked at 2025 quarterly changes in the average number of keywords triggering an AI Overview across the top 1,000 domains for each industry.
This reveals how AIOs impacted SEO portfolios across different industries throughout the year.
Across the board, Q2 showed an explosion of AIOs, but Q3 pulled back—with over half of the sectors seeing a decrease in their keywords triggering an AIO.
That decline didn’t last, as Q4 saw mostly increases again. Overall, when comparing Q4 to Q1, we can see that AIOs increased their presence among domains’ keyword rankings by an average of 155%.
Key Industry Observations:
1. Science Is on the AI Overview Frontline
Science information typically has consensus answers and is covered through well-structured content—making it easy to synthesize.
And that’s put it on the AI Overview frontline.
Despite a slight decrease since March (-1.02%), it still leads all verticals with the highest share of AI Overviews.
2. Google Is Weighing In On Sensitive Subjects
Health, People & Society, and Law & Government have seen a huge rise in AI Overview coverage. All three industries are dominated by informational queries.
It’s somewhat surprising to see Google roll out AI Overviews so aggressively in three industries that so often lack consensus answers and come with more than their fair share of misinformation risks.
3. Google Is Shying Away From Real-Time Information
News and Sports are two categories that are almost entirely made up of searches for up-to-date informational content.
The fact these categories are lagging behind the average growth in AI Overviews suggests Google is still wary of covering recent events with AI-generated content.
4. Google Is Expanding AI Overviews for Food & Drink
When we first published this study in March 2025, Food & Drink saw very little growth in AI Overviews.
Since March, this industry had the most growth of any vertical and is now sitting right around the average (11%) in terms of keywords triggering AI Overviews
This rise has brought specific challenges for food bloggers and recipe sites that previously relied on organic search traffic for monetization.
Looking ahead, Food & Drink sites may need to re-think their traffic and revenue strategies.
5. Real Estate & Shopping Are Lagging
Real Estate & Shopping have the smallest share of keywords impacted by AI Overviews and have seen relatively little growth.
The lack of growth in these areas is likely due to the fact that Google can already satisfy a lot of this demand with specialized, high-utility SERP features, such as local packs and ads.
These industries also lean more toward local search intent, meaning a searcher isn’t looking for content or education; they’re looking for local information or directions on where to take action in the real world.
While AI Overviews are highly effective at summarizing consensus information, they lack the necessary visual and contextual data (like maps, reviews, and action buttons) required for high-intent shopping and real estate decisions.
How to Track AI Overviews Impacting Your Brand
Now, what do we do with this information?
The growth and volatility of AI Overviews means marketing teams can no longer rely on traditional search rankings alone. Instead, teams should re-evaluate expectations for SEO traffic and acknowledge the value gained from becoming visible in an AIO.
The goal is no longer just ranking for clicks. It's to become the trusted source that powers Google’s answer.
Adapt by benchmarking and tracking your brand’s specific mention rate and citations within AI Overviews.
Semrush makes it easy to track AI Overviews—helping you see how your brand is performing in them.
Semrush One gives you tools for SEO and AI visibility in one subscription. You’ll gain access to many tools to help you track and win visibility in AI Overviews (and more).
- Visibility Overview helps you quickly benchmark any brand’s mentions and citations across AI Overviews
- Competitor Research helps you find the gaps in your AI Overview visibility by comparing mentions and visibility with five competitors
- Keyword Magic Tool helps you research the way people ask questions on Google—giving you ideas for a content strategy to reach your audience
- Organic Research helps you understand which competitors are appearing in AI results—and what content format or structure helps them appear there
- Position Tracking helps you keep a pulse on your AI Overview presence and alerts you to shifts, so you can act quickly
For enterprise brands that need more functionality and higher limits, Semrush Enterprise AIO offers advanced solutions tailored to the new AI search landscape.
With Enterprise AIO, you can analyze how your brand is represented across AI Overviews as well as other AI search platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. Enterprise AIO enables precision tracking of brand mentions, sentiment, sources, and competitors in real time, so brands can understand and grow their presence.
Are We Heading Toward a Post-Click World?
AI Overviews represent a shift not just in ranking—but in how Google answers questions. As the SERP becomes more generative, SEO becomes more about presence than position.
Brands that adapt fast will build trust, earn SERP visibility, and thrive in the post-click world.