AI Overviews have been among the main protagonists of the year. With an emergence that truly deserves the description of “disruptive,” these automated Google summaries gained significant prominence in our Google searches during the second and third quarters of the year, before their elder sibling, AI Mode, arrived and fundamentally reshaped the environment for everyone who depends on organic traffic.
Now, in order to assess their impact, Semrush, one of the most renowned SEO tools worldwide, has published a new study analyzing their evolution. Shall we examine it?
At the beginning of 2025, the overviews (AIO) appeared in only about 6% of global searches. This is not surprising, considering that they did not arrive in markets such as EU until March. By July, this figure soared to 25%, before dropping and stabilizing at 15.69% in November. This notable volatility, as the study suggests, is related to Google refining the quality threshold necessary for displaying generative responses, moving away from total saturation to focus on areas where AI truly adds value.
Initially, AIOs were almost exclusively informational (91%). Today, the scenario is quite different:
What does this mean? Essentially, brands must now compete with AI even at advanced stages of the sales funnel. AIOs are no longer just a concern for media outlets, blogs, or information repositories. If Google summarizes your product’s features and compares them with others before the user even arrives at your website, you need to make some changes: your content strategy must be more technical and authoritative than ever.
The greatest concern for editors was that AIOs would cannibalize organic traffic. However, data from Semrush reveals a counterintuitive reality: although AIOs frequently appear for informational queries that typically have low click-through rates, the “zero-click” rate for these keywords has consistently decreased. In fact, the percentage of searches without clicks dropped from 33.75% to 31.53% following the introduction of an AIO.
In essence, we could conclude that, in many cases, AIOs are assisting users in refining their queries and directing them to more specific sources with greater intent. As Semrush explains, “While keywords with AI Overviews have higher zero-click rates, this rate is not increasing. In fact, it has steadily declined since January. This challenges the assumption that AI Overviews always reduce clicks and points to a more complex interaction between query type, user intent, and the way AI responses are delivered. The decrease in zero-click rates is also probably related to the growth of AI Overviews among transactional and navigational searches.”
Not all industries are equally affected by AIOs. Semrush analyzed which percentage of keywords within each sector currently display an AI-generated overview, and the results are highly variable.
The Science sector leads with almost 26% AIO presence, closely followed by Computers and Electronics. Meanwhile, the Food and Beverage sector has experienced the fastest growth (+7.25% since March), which presents a new challenge for recipe bloggers and niche sites. By contrast, sectors such as Real Estate or the general Shopping category remain behind, as they depend on local and visual data that AIOs have not yet managed as effectively as maps or traditional listings.
On the other hand, Health, Society, and Law have experienced significant growth in AI Overview coverage. As Semrush clarifies, these are three sectors dominated by informational queries: “It is surprising that Google is so aggressively implementing AI Reviews in three sectors that often lack consensus answers and entail a high risk of misinformation.” At the same time, categories such as News (5.39%) and Sports (6.76%) are somewhat lagging, which would suggest a lower capacity of AIOs to address immediate current events.
AIOs do not operate in isolation. The study highlights that the presence of Google Ads on pages with AIOs jumped from 1% to 25% in less than one year. Additionally, forum blocks (Reddit) and videos (YouTube) are now almost inseparable companions to AI. Having a presence on these platforms is now an indirect requirement for being featured in Google’s generative responses.
If you wish to learn more about the impact of AI Overviews on the Google search ecosystem, I highly recommend that you try Semrush. It is the SEO tool we regularly use at Marketing4eCommerce, and it will certainly help you improve your search rankings.
Try Semrush!
Image: Gemini.
Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *
Δ