Google AI Overviews vary sharply in commercial search, agencies warned

Commercial search is where Google’s AI Overviews hit hardest, and that is exactly why broad averages keep misleading agencies. A new analysis from Peec AI, which studied 500,000 prompts, found AI Overviews in about 87% of them, but the sample skewed toward buying-intent queries and left navigational searches out. Decision-stage prompts showed an 88.5% rate, two-word queries returned an AI Overview 64.6% of the time, and prompts of 11 to 15 words peaked near 89 percent.

The market split was just as sharp. In Peec AI’s dataset, AI Overviews appeared in 76% of sampled searches in the European Union and 90.3% outside it, while France was at 0% because Google had not launched AI Overviews or AI Mode there. That kind of spread is the problem for agency reporting: a client selling products or services can face a very different search page than a publisher chasing informational traffic, and the same topline visibility number can hide that difference completely.

The contrast with broader studies makes the trap obvious. Ahrefs’ analysis of 146 million results found AI Overviews on 20.5% of keywords. A randomized field experiment cited in the same reporting put them at 42% of queries, while earlier samples from Authoritas and SE Ranking landed near 30%. Semrush’s review of more than 10 million keywords showed the rollout was volatile too: AI Overview visibility started at 6.5% of queries in January 2025, climbed to just under 25% in July, then fell below 16% by November. Over the same stretch, commercial queries with AI Overviews rose from 8% to 18%, transactional queries from 2% to 14%, and navigational queries from under 1% to more than 10%. Ads alongside AI Overviews also jumped from about 3% in January to roughly 40% by November.

That is why agencies need segmented reporting, not a single universal AI Overview number. Seer Interactive’s data showed organic click-through rate on searches with AI Overviews rose from 1.3% in December 2025 to 2.4% in February 2026, but AI Overviews were still far more common on comparison queries, about 95%, and question queries, about 86%, than on transactional searches, about 5%. Google has said AI Overviews generate the same ad revenue as traditional results, and in May 2026 it added follow-up questions and AI Mode continuity, making the feature a deeper part of Search. Google Search Console still lumps AI Overview impressions together with regular organic impressions, so agencies that do not split branded and non-branded terms, informational and commercial intent, and market by market will keep selling clients a misleading average.