SERPs.ioAI Overview Prevalence by Industry: 2026 Benchmarks
The single "AI Overview prevalence" number you see quoted in news stories hides a much messier reality. One industry has watched AI Overviews go from 18% of queries to 83% in a year. Another is still stuck at 13%. The averages are useless for planning. The verticals are not.
This is a benchmark report. It pulls together the industry-specific AI Overview data published by BrightEdge, Semrush, seoClarity, Ahrefs, Seer Interactive, SE Ranking, and Advanced Web Ranking through Q1 2026, normalizes the numbers where methodologies differ, and hands you the tables you need to size your own exposure.
If you only read one section, read the tables. Everything else is context.
TL;DR: the numbers that matter
- Across all tracked US queries, AI Overviews appear on 25.8% to 30% of searches as of early 2026 (Semrush, BrightEdge). One source tracking curated commercial keywords reports 48% AIO presence (Advanced Web Ranking).
- Healthcare leads at 88% AIO prevalence, up from 72% a year earlier (BrightEdge).
- Education and B2B tech both crossed 80% in the last twelve months, climbing from 18% and 36% respectively (Search Engine Journal coverage of BrightEdge data).
- Shopping and transactional queries are the safe harbor: only 13% to 14% of shopping keywords trigger an AIO (Semrush shopping analysis).
- Informational intent drives almost all AIO presence: 88% to 96% of AIO-triggering queries are informational, depending on the dataset (seoClarity, SE Ranking).
- Organic CTR drops 34% to 61% when an AIO appears, with the damage concentrated in health, finance, and B2B SaaS verticals (Seer Interactive, Ahrefs).
Methodology note
A few things you should know before the tables start.
Measurements disagree because datasets disagree. Semrush tracks a ten-million-keyword sample that skews toward the long tail and reports an overall AIO rate closer to 15%. BrightEdge curates tracked queries for large-client verticals and reports closer to 48%. seoClarity's 500-million-keyword US desktop dataset reports 30%. None of these are wrong. They are measuring different things.
AIO prevalence shifts weekly. Google adjusts which queries trigger AI Overviews in response to quality signals, and the Semrush Sensor has shown sub-30% swings within individual weeks. Treat every number in this article as a trailing indicator, not a commitment.
Industry labels are fuzzy. "Healthcare" in BrightEdge's dataset includes symptoms, drug information, procedures, and provider searches. It excludes insurance. "B2B tech" pulls software and hardware decision-maker queries. If your content doesn't clearly sit inside one of these buckets, interpolate.
We excluded data older than Q3 2025 wherever possible. The AI Overview rollout was still in its acceleration phase through mid-2025, and numbers from that window (for example, seoClarity's 10% from March 2025) are now stale.
With that out of the way, the benchmarks.
AI Overview prevalence by industry
The table below pulls the most recent published AIO prevalence per industry, the year-over-year change where available, and the primary source. Think of this as a snapshot, not a forecast.
| Industry | AIO prevalence (Q1 2026) | YoY change | Primary source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Healthcare / medical | 88% | 72% to 88% | BrightEdge |
| Education | 83% | 18% to 83% | BrightEdge via SEJ |
| B2B technology / SaaS | 82% | 36% to 82% | BrightEdge via SEJ |
| Restaurants | 78% | 10% to 78% | BrightEdge |
| Insurance | 63% | 17% to 63% | BrightEdge via ALM Corp |
| Finance | ~55% (volatile) | Not reported | eMarketer |
| Travel | ~50% | +700% Sept-Oct 2024 | Search Engine Land |
| Entertainment | 37% | Not reported | BrightEdge via ALM Corp |
| eCommerce (informational) | 23% | Not reported | BrightEdge |
| eCommerce (shopping queries) | 14% | Essentially unchanged | Semrush |
| Real estate | Increasing 258% YoY, low absolute base | Not reported in absolute terms | SE Ranking |
| Local services | 4% to 8% | Unchanged (Local Pack competes) | ALM Corp |
| Legal | Not separately tracked; high for informational law questions | Not reported | Accel Marketing analysis |
| Media / publishing news | Hard news queries largely insulated; lifestyle and utility content heavily hit | 26% traffic decline reported | Press Gazette |
Four things stand out here.
Healthcare is the ceiling
At 88% AIO prevalence, medical queries are effectively saturated. Google has been the most aggressive on health, likely because the YMYL quality framework encourages synthesis over raw link lists when the alternative is sending a worried user to a forum post. The upside for health content producers: AIO citations in medical queries skew heavily toward established authoritative sources (Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, NIH), so citation opportunities concentrate among a small set of brands. The downside: if you aren't one of them, you're competing for the remaining 12% of queries where the AIO doesn't appear.
Healthcare AIO prevalence climbed from 72% to 88% in a year. It's now effectively saturated.
B2B SaaS went from half-covered to mostly-covered in a year
The 36% to 82% jump in B2B tech is the single most aggressive shift in the BrightEdge dataset. For anyone selling software into decision-makers who research before they buy, this is the vertical to watch. The one bright spot: TrustRadius research found that 90% of higher-intent B2B buyers click through to at least one cited source when an AIO appears, compared to roughly 8% for general-audience queries. In B2B, being cited is genuinely worth something.
Shopping queries are still the exception, not the rule
Google appears to actively protect the shopping experience. Informational retail queries ("best air fryer for small kitchens") trigger AIOs at 23%. Transactional queries ("buy air fryer") trigger AIOs at 14%, roughly unchanged year over year. The product carousel, Shopping Ads, and Merchant Listings do the heavy lifting in transactional SERPs. AIOs appear alongside them but do not dominate the page the way they do for a symptom query.
Only 13-14% of shopping queries trigger an AI Overview. Google protects the shopping experience.
Local services and hard news are the two other safe-ish zones
Local intent queries fire the Local Pack instead of an AIO in 92% to 96% of cases. Hard news queries trigger Top Stories and news carousels, which Google has not aggressively replaced with AIOs, partly due to publisher relationships and partly due to the quality risks of summarizing breaking events. Neither protection is permanent, but both are real today.
For broader industry context, our AI search statistics roundup for 2026 tracks how these numbers compare to Perplexity, ChatGPT, and other LLM-based search interfaces.
CTR impact by industry
Prevalence is only half the picture. An AIO appearing on 88% of your queries doesn't matter if users still click through. They don't.
The Seer Interactive longitudinal study remains the cleanest read on aggregate CTR impact: organic CTR drops 61% when an AIO is present on the page (Seer). Ahrefs' December 2025 analysis of 300,000 keywords reported a 58% drop for position-one results. Earlier studies that reported 34.5% drops measured different conditions and are generally lower bounds.
Organic CTR drops 34-61% when an AIO appears, with damage concentrated in health, finance, and B2B SaaS.
What the aggregate number hides is significant vertical variation.
| Industry | Reported organic CTR drop (AIO present) | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Healthcare | Up to 60% | Social Samosa |
| Finance | Up to 60% | Social Samosa |
| B2B SaaS | 55% to 65% (non-cited brands) | Seer Interactive |
| Telecom / technology | Above-average declines | Amsive |
| Retail / ecommerce | Narrower gap; paid still dominant | Amsive |
| Travel | ~50% (informational queries) | The Planet D case |
| Publisher news (lifestyle/utility) | Up to 80% to 90% on AIO queries | Daily Mail disclosure |
| Affiliate / review content | 20% to 40% at the site level | Affiverse |
Two secondary numbers every planner should note:
- Brands cited in AI Overviews see 35% more organic clicks and 91% more paid clicks than non-cited peers, according to Seer. The CTR benchmark is a weighted average across cited and non-cited pages. If you're cited, your realized CTR drop is a fraction of the headline. If you're not, it's worse than the headline.
- Paid CTR drops harder than organic in most verticals (68% versus 61% per Seer). This surprises buyers, because ads have traditionally been above-the-fold. AIOs are now above the ads.
For the full breakdown of CTR methodology and publisher casualties, see our analysis of AI Overview CTR impact.
AIO prevalence by search intent
Intent is the strongest predictor of whether your pages will see an AIO. The vertical is secondary to whether the query answers a question.
| Intent type | Share of AIO-triggering queries | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Informational | 88% to 96% | seoClarity, SE Ranking |
| Commercial investigation | ~9% | SE Ranking |
| Transactional | 1.2% to 1.8% | seoClarity |
| Navigational | Rare, not separately tracked | N/A |
Translated to planning terms:
- A bottom-of-funnel page targeting "[product] pricing" or "buy [product]" has roughly a 1-in-60 chance of facing an AIO on its target query.
- A top-of-funnel page targeting "how does [category] work" or "what is [concept]" is nearly guaranteed to face one in 2026.
- Comparison content ("[product] vs [competitor]") sits in the middle. Commercial investigation queries trigger AIOs more often in B2B SaaS than in retail, because B2B research queries skew informational in language even when commercial in intent.
The implication: informational content isn't losing its value, but its traffic profile is. Pages that used to capture 4% CTR from a #1 ranking now capture 1.5%. Your informational content is still feeding the top of the funnel. It's just feeding the AIO first, and the brand-preference benefit from citations is the real prize.
We go deeper into the informational-vs-transactional split, and how to adapt content planning to it, in Featured Snippets vs AI Overviews.
Desktop vs mobile AIO prevalence
Device stratification matters more than most planners realize. Roughly 81% of searches that trigger an AI Overview are performed on mobile, compared to two-thirds of all searches overall. That tells you AIOs skew to mobile even after accounting for mobile search dominance.
| Device | Share of AIO-triggering searches | AIO screen real estate |
|---|---|---|
| Mobile | ~81% | 48% of visible screen above the fold |
| Desktop | ~19% | 42% of visible screen |
On mobile, the AIO typically occupies the entire visible screen above the fold. The user has to scroll past a synthesized answer to see a single organic result. On desktop, organic results sit alongside the AIO in the right rail and below, and user eye-tracking still drifts to them.
This is why mobile zero-click rates (77% per SparkToro) dwarf desktop (46% per the same study). If your traffic is mobile-dominant (which is most consumer content and a growing share of B2B), your realized CTR drop is closer to the upper bound of the Seer range.
What this means for planning
Here is how we see teams actually using these benchmarks in 2026.
Size your exposure, not the industry average
If you're a B2B SaaS vendor, your planning baseline is 82% AIO prevalence on relevant queries, not the 25.8% overall US average. Your expected CTR loss on organic traffic is 55% to 65% weighted across cited and non-cited pages, not 34%. The industry average is misleading in both directions depending on where you sit.
Pull your top 100 queries, run them through a SERP tracker (Semrush's AI Overview tracker, seoClarity's SERP Features report, or AWR's AIO search engine all work for this), and compute your own AIO prevalence rate. That is the number to plan against. Because AIO prevalence shifts week-to-week, most in-house teams now pair a rank tracker like serps.io with industry benchmarks to spot exposure changes early.
Separate your content by intent
Most content plans bucket by topic. In an AIO world, bucket by intent first.
- Informational content should be optimized for citation, not for clicks. Structure, factual density, statistic-rich sections, and clean attribution all correlate with citation probability. See our guides on GEO and AEO for tactical specifics.
- Commercial investigation content should optimize for both citation and conversion. Users who click through from an AIO-cited source convert at higher rates than cold organic visitors.
- Transactional content still operates in a largely AIO-free SERP. Standard SEO applies. This is the part of your stack where 2022-era best practices still work.
Build a traffic-quality narrative, not a traffic-volume one
The research is converging on a pattern: fewer visitors, higher conversion rates. Semrush data shows AI search referrals converting at roughly 4.4x the rate of traditional organic visits. If your reporting still leads with sessions and bounces, the AIO era looks catastrophic. If it leads with revenue per visitor, LTV by source, or qualified demo requests, it looks different.
Diversify away from Google organic where unit economics support it
Some fraction of your previous Google traffic is not coming back. The Chartbeat data showing publishers down 33% globally year over year is the trailing edge of a structural shift. Email, community, social distribution, and interactive tools (things an AIO can't summarize away) become relatively more valuable as Google organic contracts. For context on how far the zero-click trend has already gone, see our zero-click search analysis.
How to measure your own industry's exposure
If you want to move from these benchmarks to your own number, the rough process is:
- Export your top 100 to 500 ranking queries from Search Console, Semrush, or Ahrefs. Weight by impressions or clicks, whichever matches how you plan.
- Classify intent for each: informational, commercial investigation, transactional. Templates exist; SE Ranking, Semrush, and seoClarity all tag intent automatically now.
- Run SERP checks on the top 50 queries to measure what percent currently trigger an AIO. You can do this manually or through a tracker. Most trackers now expose a per-query "AIO present" flag.
- Compute your weighted AIO prevalence. This is your real exposure number.
- Compare to the benchmarks above. If you're above your vertical's median, you skew informational and should prioritize citation work. If you're below, your content mix is heavier on transactional or navigational queries and your short-term AIO risk is lower.
- Check citation rate. For each AIO-triggering query in your set, check whether your domain is cited. A low citation rate alongside high AIO prevalence is the worst profile. A high citation rate in the same setup is the best.
Repeat this measurement quarterly. The prevalence numbers are still moving.
Key takeaways
- AI Overview prevalence ranges from 13% (shopping queries) to 88% (healthcare) depending on vertical and intent. The "25.8% US average" is rarely the right planning number.
- Education and B2B tech had the most aggressive one-year jumps, both crossing 80% in twelve months.
- CTR impact scales with prevalence and intent: informational-heavy verticals in health, finance, and B2B SaaS see the sharpest declines.
- Brands cited in AIOs get 35% more organic clicks and 91% more paid clicks than non-cited peers. Citation, not ranking, is the leverage point.
- Mobile users account for ~81% of AIO-triggering searches and face the full 48%-of-screen AIO real estate, which is why mobile zero-click rates run 30 percentage points higher than desktop.
- Transactional queries remain a near-AIO-free zone. For now.
The benchmarks will shift. The structure of the shift is predictable: informational content absorbs AIO prevalence first, commercial investigation follows, and transactional queries move last if at all. Plan against the vertical and intent distribution of your own query set, not the industry headline.
Frequently asked questions
What percentage of Google searches show an AI Overview in 2026?
Across tracked US queries, AI Overviews appear on roughly 25.8% to 30% of searches as of early 2026, according to Semrush and BrightEdge data. Curated commercial keyword sets, like the one Advanced Web Ranking tracks, report as high as 48% presence. The number you should plan against is your own weighted query mix, not the overall average.
Which industry has the highest AI Overview prevalence?
Healthcare leads at 88% AIO prevalence on medical queries, according to BrightEdge's Q1 2026 data. Education (83%) and B2B technology (82%) are close behind, with both verticals more than doubling their AIO exposure in the last twelve months. These three verticals are effectively saturated for informational queries.
Do shopping queries trigger AI Overviews?
Rarely. Only about 13% to 14% of transactional shopping queries trigger an AI Overview, and that number has been roughly unchanged year over year. Informational retail queries ("best air fryer under $100") trigger AIOs at a higher rate of around 23%. Google appears to protect the shopping experience in favor of product carousels, Shopping Ads, and Merchant Listings.
How do AI Overviews affect click-through rates?
Seer Interactive's longitudinal study reports organic CTR drops of 61% when an AIO is present, with Ahrefs' 300,000-keyword study finding a 58% drop at position one. Impact is worse in health, finance, and B2B SaaS, where non-cited brands see 55% to 65% drops. Brands cited in the AIO see 35% more organic clicks and 91% more paid clicks than non-cited peers, so citation status matters more than ranking position.
Are AI Overviews more common on mobile or desktop?
Mobile. Roughly 81% of AIO-triggering searches happen on mobile, compared to about two-thirds of all searches overall, per BrightEdge. On mobile the AIO also occupies around 48% of the visible screen above the fold, versus 42% on desktop, which is why mobile zero-click rates run roughly 30 percentage points higher than desktop.
How often do AI Overview prevalence numbers change?
Weekly. Google adjusts which queries trigger AIOs in response to quality signals, and the Semrush Sensor has recorded sub-30% swings within individual weeks. Every published prevalence number is a trailing indicator, so re-measure your own query set at least quarterly.
For the companion data on how these prevalence numbers translate into click-through losses, see our AI Overviews and CTR analysis. For the device and intent detail behind the zero-click numbers, see zero-click searches in the AI era.