How often AI Overviews actually appear, January 2025 to April 2026

Ask how often Google shows an AI Overview and you will get a different number depending on who tracked it. Semrush, which runs the largest published keyword panel on this question, has now tracked the same phenomenon for more than a year, and its own numbers alone show a share that tripled, peaked and pulled back - before rising again in the segment that pays for search traffic.

What Semrush’s own tracking shows#

Semrush’s first study followed more than 10 million keywords in its database from January through November 2025, checking each one for AI Overview presence. AI Overviews appeared on 6.49% of those keywords in January 2025. That share climbed through the first half of the year to a peak of about 24.61% in July, then fell back to 15.69% by November - roughly a two-thirds retreat from the peak inside four months.

Semrush followed up with a second study, this one narrower and more recent: more than 600,000 keywords from its U.S. desktop database, tracked from November 2025 through April 2026 and split by industry, search intent and cost per click. Commercial-intent SERPs saw AI Overview appearance grow by 71% on average over that window, while transactional-intent SERPs actually fell 5%. By April 2026, jobs and education keywords - a high-CPC category - had more than 60% AI Overview coverage, the highest reported figure in either Semrush study.

These two studies measure different things: the first is an overall panel share, the second is growth within commercial-intent keywords plus one segment’s absolute figure. Neither extends the other into a single continuous line, and Semrush has not published a full-panel percentage for any month after November 2025.

Why the numbers do not agree across trackers#

Conductor, an independent competitor in this space, analyzed 21.9 million Google searches over a four-week window from 15 September to 12 October 2025 and found 5.5 million of them - 25.11% - generated an AI Overview. That sits close in time to Semrush’s July 2025 peak of 24.61% but well above the 15.69% Semrush reported for November, the month nearest to Conductor’s own window.

The gap is not an error in either study. Semrush and Conductor pull from different keyword panels, different industries, different geographies and different detection logic for what counts as an AI Overview actually rendering. A tracker weighted toward informational, long-tail queries will report a lower share than one weighted toward the health and finance categories where AI Overviews appear most often. Treat every prevalence figure, including the ones in this piece, as specific to its own panel rather than as a universal constant - and never average two trackers’ numbers together as if they measured the same population.

Why we care#

A single prevalence percentage tells you almost nothing about your own site. What matters is whether AI Overviews appear on the specific keywords you rank for, and both Semrush studies agree on the direction: commercial and high-CPC queries are gaining AI Overview coverage faster than the overall panel average. Check your own Search Console query list against which of your terms sit in a high-CPC, commercial-intent category - those are the ones where a July-2025-sized swing is now the more likely outcome, not the exception.