VercatusEvidence on when AI Overviews appear in 2026
AI Overviews fire on a minority of all queries but a majority of question-form ones, and the rate depends on the panel. An academic audit of 55,393 trending queries (13 Mar–21 Apr 2026, preprint under review) measured 13.7% overall activation, rising to 64.7% for question-form queries. Semrush's 10M+ keyword panel rose from 6.49% (Jan 2025) to a 24.61% peak (Jul 2025) and fell to 15.69% (Nov 2025). BrightEdge's tracked keyword set showed 46% presence in Nov 2025 (34% a year earlier), with "best [product]" queries at 83% (5% a year earlier) but eCommerce overall at 16%. Pew measured an AI summary on 18% of real-user Google searches in Mar 2025. The mix is shifting: in Semrush's panel the informational share of AIO-triggering queries fell from 91.3% (Jan 2025) to 57.1% (Oct 2025), while navigational AIOs rose from 0.74% to 10.33%.
Sources
- 1Xu, Iqbal, Montgomery · 2026Measuring Google AI Overviews: Activation, Source Quality, Claim Fidelity, and Publisher Impact (arXiv:2605.14021)arxiv.org
- 2Semrush · 2025Semrush AI Overviews Study: What 2025 SEO Data Tells Us About Google's Search Shiftsemrush.com
- 3BrightEdge · 2025Black Friday 2024 vs. 2025: What a Year of Testing Taught Google About AI Overviewsbrightedge.com
- 4Pew Research · 2025Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the resultspewresearch.org
CGrade C: reputable industry data or observation. A grade describes the provenance of the sources above; it is not a probability that a change will work. The effect basis says how the size of the effect is known: measured by a study, taken from an industry report, only documented without a size, or not quantified.
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