Overview

AI Overviews (AIOs), a feature that offers a Generative AI summary of information above organic search results for certain queries, have had a volatile rollout starting in May 2024.

Here's an AIO example:

To understand the impact of Google's AI Overviews on organic keyword rankings, we have conducted an in-depth analysis based on the data from our extensive Research Grid dataset.

Our research provides a look at the findings, segmented by industry, keyword intent, and keyword type (e.g., YMYL, local, and buying guides).

Key Takeaways

Prevalence of AI Overviews: AIOs now appear for 10.4% of U.S. desktop keywords—a new high (as of March 2025).
AIOs experienced a significant 119% increase in frequency on mobile in March 2025.
>99% of the instances of AI Overviews were sourced from the top 10 web results.
AIOs primarily appear for informational queries. However, the number of AIOs in transactional keywords is slowly rising with a corresponding slight drop in informational queries.
Future Tracking: We will continue to track and report on the appearance of AI Overviews as more data becomes available.

AI Overviews Surge ~156.7% (Sept 2024 to March 2025)

Based on our substantial Research Grid dataset, the prevalence AI Overviews on desktop searches in the U.S. has increased significantly over the past several months, aside from a significant drop in December 2024.

During the March algorithm update, AIOs in U.S. Desktop keywords increased 31% to their highest ever since we have been able to track them. They now appear for 10.4% of U.S. desktop keywords as of March 2025.

For reference, in December 2024, AIOs appeared for 5.5 US million keywords out of a total sample of 120 million, which equated to just 4.5%.

UK Presence of AIOs Increases ~200% (Sept 2024 to March 2025)

Between Sept 2024 to March 2025, the prevalence of AIOs on desktop searches in the UK has also increased substantially at roughly 200%.

We will continue tracking AIO and updating these figures as we gather more data.

AIOs Increase in Frequency on Mobile by 119% (March 2025)

Based on data from seoClarity's Research Grid, AIOs in mobile US keywords more than doubled in March 2025. For the first time since their initial release, mobile is almost on par with desktop.

Mobile AI Overviews March 2025

Frequency of AIOs for mobile U.S. searches.

This marks a significant shift since January 2025, when AIOs appeared on desktop searches roughly 30% more than mobile.

We've built a complete workflow within seoClarity that enables clients to take full advantage of this data to see the impact of AIO on the traffic and to measure the CTR impact this could have.

AI Overviews in seoClarity

Top 10 Web Results Feature in AIO Sources 99.5% of the Time

We analyzed 36,000 keywords and compared the URLs showing up in AIOs to those ranking in the top 10 organic results.

Our findings revealed that one or more of the top 10 web results were included in the AI Overview's sources a staggering 99.5% of the time.

This marks a substantial change from what we saw in Google's Search Generative Experience (SGE) and the early days of AIO where there was very little correlation between ranking sites and what appeared in AIO results.

Digging deeper into the data, we also found that nearly 80% of the AI Overview results contain a link to one or more of the top 3 ranking results. And when looking at just the top 1 position, the AI Overview contained a link to it almost 50% of the time.

We speculate that this shift is in response to widespread criticism of the frequent inaccuracy of AIOs, prompting Google to incorporate some traditional ranking factors in selecting AIO sources.

The bottom line? One of the best ways to get referenced in an AIO now is to rank highly in Google.

Some additional background on these results:

These are early results for 36K keywords. As AIOs keep expanding, we may see a decline in the percentage of sources from the top 10 results. Nevertheless, even this early glimpse indicates a significant change from Google.
The keywords analyzed are those tracked by our clients, so they tend to be "money" keywords (the informational and transactional keywords these clients care about most). As such, results may vary for more obscure, long-tail searches.
These results also highlight a substantial advantage that Google has over standard LLMs — its understanding of relevant and authoritative sites — which it is leveraging to improve the AI results. Google understands website authority and has a lot more signals than any standard LLM like ChatGPT or Perplexity would have.

77% of AIOs Include Referenced Links Exclusively From the Top 10 Web Results

Looking at the data a bit differently, we also sought to uncover how many AI Overviews had ALL the referenced links from the Top 10 web results.

Incredibly, 77% of all keywords triggered AI Overviews only included references from the Top 10 results.

This further solidifies our hypothesis that Google is confident in its existing ranking system's ability to generate high-quality AI Overview summaries.

AIO Impact by Industry

The presence of AI Overviews varies significantly across different industries. Based on our analysis, here's a breakdown of the impact by industry:

Listing of industries showing the most AI Overviews in January 2025

AIO appears to impact the Health, Business & Industrial, and the News, Media & Publishers industries most significantly.

These top 20 have remained relatively stable over the past several months, with only a few categories switching places. For reference, here are the top industries that were represented in AI Overviews back in September 2024.

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Impact By Intent: ~88% of AIOs Appear for Informational Queries

Transactional: Initially, AI Overviews did not appear for most transactional head terms. However, the number of AIOs in transactional keywords has slowly risen to 8.9% as of March 2025.

Informational: AI Overviews most commonly appear for queries with informational intent. However, the prevalence of AIOs for informational keywords is slowly dropping in correspondence with the rise of transactional appearances.

Additionally, as of December 2024, the keywords in our Research Grid dataset that trigger AIOs have less than 0.7 percent of traffic potential — the traffic you would receive if you ranked #1 for all your keywords. This metric was calculated by comparing the overall traffic potential across several of our clients with the traffic potential of the keywords that display an AIO.

Research Methodology

As of August 15, 2024, Google rolled out AI Overviews to non-logged-in users.

Since then, we have been able to track AIOs across all the keywords within seoClarity's Research Grid database. The metrics from December 2024 onward are based on our entire US dataset of 500+ million keywords.

We will continue to provide updated data and insights as AI Overviews evolve.

Next Steps

To monitor the impact of AI overviews on your rankings and traffic, we’ve outlined several ways to do so using the seoClarity platform – including using our AI Overviews filter in SERP Features which tracks AIO summaries generated as a "Top Insights" panel.

In addition, clients now have the ability to:

See which keywords trigger AI Overviews
Check whether they or their competitors are linked/referenced
Review the AIO content itself (through SERP Previews)

This makes seoClarity the first and only Enterprise SEO platform to provide AIO tracking at scale with in-depth details.

Not currently an seoClarity client? Learn more about how our platform can help you monitor and strategize for AIO by scheduling a quick demo.

About the Author: Mark Traphagen

Mark Traphagen is Vice President of Product Marketing and Training for seoClarity. His previous careers as a salesman and then a teacher were excellent preparations for what he does now. Mark's deep dive into online marketing began about 14 years ago when he was tasked with turning around a failing independent bookstore. He took the store online and developed practices of content marketing, influencer relationships, exceptional customer service, and community building that brought the store to profitability in two years. Since that time he has dedicated himself to learning what really works for online business success. He is a sought after speaker at conferences such as PubCon, State of Search, and SMX, and a featured writer for major online publications such as the Moz Blog, Search Engine Land, Marketing Land, and a VIP Columnist for Search Engine Journal.

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Impact of Google’s AI Overviews: SEO Research Study

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