AI Overviews now show on 88% of US commercial keywords

Semrush checked the same 400 keywords every month for a year, grouped by the words a buyer adds when close to a decision. "Best X for Y" searches ended at 96.12%, up 53.4 points. Review searches went from just under a third to 90%, the biggest rise. Searches for a brand's alternatives rose 34 points to over 82%, and brand against brand searches, already at 63.41% a year earlier, passed 86%.

By industry, ecommerce moved most, from 32.62% to 85.11%, and all three industries ended between 85% and 91%. Twelve of the 15 industry and search-type pairs reached at least 80%. The three below it were alternatives in banking at 65%, prices in ecommerce at 71.43% (up from 4.76%) and reviews in software at 75%. Weighted by estimated search volume, overviews appeared on 97.08% of the panel's searches: the 12% of keywords without one made up less than 3% of search volume.

The study has limits worth keeping in mind: a fixed panel, US desktop results only, three industries and estimated volumes. It counts whether an overview appeared, not who it named or how many people clicked.

Not everywhere yet. SE Ranking checked 1,000 US and 1,000 German brand keywords three times each in October 2026 on desktop and found an AI Overview on 82.5% of US brand keywords on average across the three checks, against 40.4% in Germany. Our own Google UK reading of 6 October found an overview on 78 of 150 searches for the names of 50 big UK brands. The three samples were built differently, so read the gap between countries as rough.

Our UK AI Shortlist Study put 1,000 fixed buying questions from 25 commercial categories to Google UK in three rounds on 6 and 7 September 2026. An AI Overview appeared on 2,556 of the 3,000 searches, 85.2%. Google showed none on 443, and one search returned nothing we could read.

Where an overview appeared and the first organic result was a supplier's own website, the overview did not name that supplier in 36.7% of the eligible overviews we scored (539 of 1,470). On most UK buying searches a buyer now sees a summary Google writes, and the business ranked first in the results is often missing from it.

Start with the searches nearest a sale in your category: your product or service with "reviews", "price", "alternatives", "vs" a named rival, and "best" for the customer you serve. For each one, record whether an overview appears, which businesses it names and which pages it cites. If the cited pages are review sites, comparison sites or a rival's guide, those are the pages to get onto, and the gaps in your own pages are the questions the overview answers that your site does not.

Our free Google AI Overview checker runs one of those searches from a clean, logged-out browser in the UK or US and shows whether an overview appeared and whether it cited your website. The Google AI Overviews tracker page explains how we measure that over time.

The UK figures come from the UK AI Shortlist Study. Its 1,000 questions were fixed before collection and each was searched on Google three times between 14:30 UTC on 6 September and 00:07 UTC on 7 September 2026, with the country set to the UK and no device, account or session sent. A search counted as showing an AI Overview when Google's result page carried one. The counts are from the study's methodology record, and the evidence bundle and headline CSV are free to download from the study page. These are searches from a question set, not keywords weighted by volume, so they are not directly comparable with Semrush's figures. The Semrush and SE Ranking figures are their own and we have not re-run them.