Keeping pace with AI is exhausting and overwhelming – and so important.
To quench my own curiosity and make life easier for you, I’ve spent hours reading 19 original analyses of AI Overviews (AIOs). I’ve summarized them and synthesized the insights into five key questions:
How often does Google show AI Overviews?
What triggers AI Overviews?
How do AI Overviews impact click-through rates and SEO traffic?
How can you rank in AI Overviews?
How should you rethink content creation for AI Overviews?
This guide is perfect for you if you:
Want to get a comprehensive overview of AI Overviews.
Are tired of keeping up with AI news and want a single source of the most important information.
Seek a comparison of the outcomes from AI Overview studies.
Image Credit: Lyna ™
My goal is to provide a “meta-analysis”: In (medical) research, a meta-analysis is a statistical method where researchers combine data from multiple independent studies on the same topic to produce a single, more robust conclusion about the overall effect, providing a more comprehensive picture than any individual study alone could offer.
Essentially, it’s a “study of studies” that analyzes and summarizes results from various research papers to identify trends and patterns across the data.
I always preach that “we need more data” to form stronger convictions. Now, we have more. Let’s form.
The Studies
Image Credit: Kevin Indig
Get the spreadsheet with sample sizes and publish dates: Sheet.
Google AIO Impact – SEO & PPC CTRs at all time low
AI Overviews: What Are They & How Do They Affect SEO?
AI Overviews Study: Inside Google’s New Search Reality
I Analyzed 300K Keywords. Here’s What I Learned About AI Overviews
We Studied 200,000 AI Overviews: Here’s What We Learned
Google AI Overviews Study: 25+ Statistics from 405,576 searches
Search Intent and AI Overviews: Study Insights
AI on Innovation – Part 2
AI Overviews Research: Google Ads in the AIO-inclusive SERPs
AI on Innovation – Part 1
How Google AI Overview impacts 20 industries
Publishers report ‘negligible’ traffic impact of Google AI Overviews
Impact of Google’s AI Overviews: SEO Research Study
AI Overview Study for 8,000 Keywords in Google Search
The Traffic Impact of AI Overviews
AI Overviews SEO Impact Report [New Data]
‘Devastating’ potential impact of Google AI Overviews on publisher visibility revealed
AI Overview Trends: Insights from 5,000 HR and Workforce Management Keywords for SaaS
AI vs. SEO: What does the Future of Search look like?
How Often Does Google Show AI Overviews?
Image Credit: Kevin Indig
The biggest question, of course, is, “How much does this matter”? To my surprise, the AIO-pocalypse has not yet happened. At least not according to the data.
How many keywords show AIOs in the respective studies:
Press Gazette, 05/24: 23.7% out of 3,300 news keywords (US). [17]
Growth Memo, 05/24: 42% of 546,000 queries. [15]
AWR, 07/24: 12.4% of 8,000 keywords. [14]
SE Ranking, 08/24: 12.47% of 100,000 keywords. [9]
Botify, 08/24: 47% of 120,000 keywords. [3]
DotDash Meredith, 08/24: 15% “of searches across our categories.”
Ziff Davis, 08/24: “8% of most important queries”. [12]
Rich Sanger / Authoritas, 09/24: 21.1% of 11,000 keywords. [7]
seoClarity, 12/24: 4.5% of 120 million keywords. [13]
Semrush, 01/25: 6.7% across millions of keywords. [5]
Source
The coverage varies very much by industry.
Industry Distribution
Source
Press Gazette, 05/24: [17]
Horoscopes: 62%
Health: 55%
Geo locations: 47%
Shopping: 43%
Media & Tech: 36%
AWR, 08/24: [14]
Health: 67.5%
Safety: 46.1%
Technology: 23%
SEO: 17%
Finance: 17%
Zapier, 08/24: [11]
Relationships: 40.6%
Food & Beverage: 23.6%
Business: 18.5%
Technology: 17.2%
Wellness: 15.6%
SE Ranking, 08/24: [9]
Relationships: 46.1%
Food & Beverage: 33.5%
Business: 23.4%
DotDash Meredith, 08/24: [12]
Health
Technology
Finance
Semrush, 01/25: [5]
Health: 23.0%
Science: 20.1%
Internet & Telecom: 11.7%
Travel: 10.0%
Computers & Electronics: 8.75%
Implications:
AI Overviews came hot out of the beta gate on May 14, 2024. Since then, we’re seeing fewer keywords showing AI Overviews – not more. That’s counterintuitive to me. And a bit counter to my personal experience when using Search. But that’s the data.
The latest studies share numbers between 4.5 and 6.7% compared to early studies that found 12.5 – 42%. It seems that the TsunAImi I was worried about hasn’t materialized itself yet, and there are still plenty of non-AIO keywords left that can deliver meaningful organic traffic. However, I wonder how well we really track the longtail keywords that show AIOs (more in a moment).
It’s also noteworthy that Semrush [3] found significant differences between mobile and desktop AI Overviews: The most populated industries on the desktop are health, people and society, and science, while mobile shows most AIOs for people and society, science, and food & drink.
YMYL industries like health show the most AIOs. And I just don’t understand why. If I were Google and launched LLM answers that are prone to hallucination, I’d start in a space where it’s less consequential, like people and society or entertainment. To be fair, some studies show that Google invests in those “lightweight” verticals. But health comes up most consistently at the top. I assume that Google has a lot of medical studies that it uses to ground health-related AI Overviews.
What Triggers AI Overviews?
Source
The common theory is that AIOs disrupt predominantly informational searches, and the data backs that up.
Search intent is important because, theoretically, even a low percentage of keywords showing AI Overviews could have a big impact if those keywords are important for business and influence purchase decisions.
Image Credit: Kevin Indig
Every study I looked at confirmed that the majority of AI Overviews show up for informational-intent keywords like questions:
Flow, 06/24: 24% of AIOs show up for top-of-the-funnel and 5% for bottom-of-the-funnel keywords. [18]
AWR, 07/24: 34.7% of queries showing an AOI include the question word “how.” 21.3% of AIOs show up for informational keywords, compared to 4% for commercial/transactional. [14]
Botify, 08/24: 59% of informational keywords trigger an AIO, compared to 19% of commercial keywords. [3]
Rich Sanger / Authoritas, 09/24: 28.8% of keywords showing an AIO are informational compared to 11.1% commercial/transactional. [7]
Ahrefs, 10/24: 99.2% of information keywords trigger an AIO compared to 10% of commercial/transactional keywords. [4]
seoClarity, 12/24: 92.9% of keywords showing an AIO have informational intent. [13]
Semrush, 01/25: 80% of desktop and 76% of mobile AIOs targeted informational keywords. 35% of desktop and 32% of mobile keywords were questions. Transactional keywords showed AIOs only 3% of the time. [5]
Seer, 02/25: 31.6% of keywords showing an AIO are questions compared to 9.7% without an AIO. [1]
User intent is tightly connected to query length. The longer, the easier it is to gauge what a searcher wants. And the lower the search volume.
Longtail Vs. Shorthead
Longer queries are more likely to trigger AIOs:
AWR, 07/24: Queries with five words (long-tail) trigger AIOs 22.6% of the time compared to one with 0.9% and 10-word queries with 0.2%.
Botify, 08/24: 73.6% of long-tail queries (+5 terms) trigger an AIO, compared to 8.9% for short-head queries. Also, 55% of queries < 1,000 monthly searches show an AIO. [3]
Ahrefs, 10/24: Long-tail keywords are more likely to trigger AIOs than shorthead keywords. Search volume for keywords showing AIOs is 193x smaller than for keywords not showing AIOs. [4]
Semrush, 01/25: 82% of desktop and 76% of mobile AIOs occurred for keywords with less than 1,000 monthly searches. [5]
Seer, 02/‘25: The average query length leading to an AI Overview was 4.29 words compared to 3.48 words for a query not presenting an AIO. [1]
Maybe not a trigger, but a strong co-occurrence exists between AIOs and SERP Features.
Featured Snippets
Featured Snippets and AI Overviews tend to show up together:
AWR, 07/24: AI Overviews appear alongside Featured Snippets in 59.5% of keywords. [14]
Botify, 08/24: Featured Snippets and AIOs co-occur 60% of the time and cover 67-76% of your screen, depending on the device. [3]
Ahrefs, 10/24: Featured Snippets appear for 65.5% of keywords showing an AIO. Google is much less likely to show Knowledge Panels and videos when AIOs are present, probably because the Knowledge Graph is the foundation for AIO generation. [4]
Paid Search Results
Source
Google seems to shy away from showing PPC ads when AIOs are present: