VercatusAI overview top10 overlap
AI Overview source selection is not a re-ranking of the organic first page. In a 55,393-query audit (13 March–21 April 2026, 7,583 AI Overviews) only 41.4% of AIO reference domains overlapped with the top-10 results and 29.8% did not appear anywhere on the first page, while cited domains were on average more credible than the co-displayed results. Ahrefs (March 2026, 863K SERPs, 4M AIO URLs) found 38% of AIO-cited pages also rank in the top 10, down from about 76% in its July 2025 study; it attributes the drop partly to better citation parsing and to Gemini 3 powering AI Overviews.
Sources
- 1Xu, Iqbal, Montgomery · 2026Measuring Google AI Overviews: Activation, Source Quality, Claim Fidelity, and Publisher Impact (arXiv:2605.14021)arxiv.org
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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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