Google's AI answer shows on 0.9% of searches for a site by name, and 57.9% of questions
563 words · about 3 min
An AI Overview is the answer Google writes at the top of the results page, above the links. It appears on 0.9% of searches trying to reach a particular site, 2.1% of searches with buying intent, 4.3% of searches researching a purchase, and 13.1% of searches containing a brand name against 24.9% of searches containing none. But the searches a content site earns from — "X vs Y", "review", "best of" — get one 81-95% of the time.
- How it was measured
- Ahrefs read 146,122,391 pages of Google results and published how many searches each percentage is out of, which is what makes it checkable. It lands in the same place as a separate Pew study that watched what people actually did in their browsers — a different set of searches, gathered a different way, 2,100 times smaller: one-word searches 9.5% here against Pew's 8%, questions 57.9% against Pew's 60%.
- Last checked
Listen to this Playing read from this page, nothing added
Watch it plot 45s · narrated · the same figures as above
Sometimes Google writes its own answer at the top of the results page, above the links. It is called an AI Overview. There is a real pattern in which searches get one and which do not, and almost everyone describes it wrongly — including us, at first.
Here is how often one appears, sorted by what the person was trying to do. The figures come from a study of 146 million results pages that says how many searches each percentage is out of:
| What the searcher wanted | Gets an AI answer |
|---|---|
| To reach a particular site | 0.9% |
| To buy something | 2.1% |
| To research before buying | 4.3% |
| Anything, with a brand name in it | 13.1% |
| Anything, with no brand name in it | 24.9% |
| every search, averaged | 20.5% |
Length matters too. A search of 1 word gets one 9.5% of the time, a search of 7 words or more 46.4%, and a question 57.9%.
Those last figures match a completely separate study by Pew, which watched what people actually did in their browsers rather than reading Google's results pages. Pew got 8%, 53% and 60%. Two different methods, six months apart, one of them 2,100 times larger than the other, landing in the same place. The longer the search, the likelier the AI answer — that is the best-established fact in this area.
The searches that are spared are the ones you cannot win
Three kinds of search almost never get an AI answer: someone reaching for a site they already know, someone ready to buy, and anyone typing a brand name.
Which sounds like good news until you notice what it means. A new publisher has no brand for anyone to type. The searches that are protected are exactly the ones you cannot compete for.
Meanwhile the searches a content site actually earns from are the opposite. From a separate study of 49,358 searches:
| The search looks like | Gets an AI answer |
|---|---|
| "X vs Y" | 95.4% |
| "review" | 86.3% |
| "price / cost / buy" | 83.4% |
| "best of" | 81.3% |
And it is growing. Across more than 600,000 search terms between November 2025 and April 2026, the share of buying-related results pages carrying an AI answer grew 71%. It went up every single month, in all ten industries measured, with finance up 231%.
A mistake in method we earned the hard way
Our first read of this was wrong, and wrong in a way worth showing.
We quoted a vendor's own before-and-after pair — the share of buying-related searches with an AI answer going from 8.15% to 18.57% — as evidence that the protection had disappeared.
Then we pulled the thirteen monthly figures between those two ends, and they say something different: the number jumped once, in April-May 2025, and then sat flat or drifted down for seventeen months. Buying-related searches actually peaked in July 2025.
Two numbers a year apart cannot show you a jump followed by a plateau — there is no shape you can draw between two dots. Vendors publish the pair rather than the series because the pair is more dramatic. Our conclusion happened to survive on better evidence. Our reasoning did not.
Tracked as EXEMPTION-IS-BRANDED, COMMERCIAL-IS-SATURATED, AI-OVERVIEW-CTR. If a number here looks wrong, tell us and we will check it against the source.