Google AI Overviews Hit 88% of Commercial Searches: What It Means for Your Business

For a couple of years, Google AI Overviews were something you mostly saw on informational searches. Someone asked how long to boil an egg or what a VPN is, and an AI summary appeared above the results. Commercial searches, the ones where people compare products and check prices before spending money, stayed relatively untouched. That is no longer the case.

A new Semrush study, published on 21 October, tracked 400 US commercial keywords across banking, software and ecommerce for a full year. In September 2025, AI Overviews appeared on 45.75% of those keywords. By August 2026, the figure was 88%. Weight the numbers by search volume and it gets starker: 97% of the actual search traffic in the panel now lands on a page with an AI summary at the top.

If your business depends on people finding you through Google, whether you sell software, run an online store or offer services, this is the moment to take AI Overviews seriously. Let's sink in!

What the Semrush study actually found

The study followed five types of commercial query, the kind buyers type when they are close to a decision: "alternatives", "brand vs brand", "best X for Y", "price" and "cost" queries, and "reviews". Semrush checked each keyword monthly from September 2025 to August 2026, on US desktop search.

Every single category grew, and some exploded. Review queries went from 30% coverage to 89%. "Best X for Y" searches, the classic shortlist query, reached 96%. Price and cost queries hit 82%, alternatives 83%, and brand-versus-brand comparisons 87%. In three industry and query combinations, banking "best X" searches among them, coverage reached a flat 100%.

The industry picture moved in the same direction. Ecommerce keywords saw the biggest jump, from under 33% to 85% in a year. Software sat at about 91% and banking at about 89%. Wherever your business falls, the odds are that your buyers' comparison searches now open with an AI-written answer rather than a list of ten blue links.

One caveat worth knowing: the panel is 400 keywords, so a single keyword can move a category by a few points. But the direction is consistent across every category and every industry, and it matches what other trackers have been reporting through 2026. This is not a blip.

Why AI Overviews target commercial searches

Informational traffic was always nice to have. Commercial traffic pays the bills. A person searching "best accounting software for small business" or "shopify alternatives" is days, sometimes hours, away from a purchase. These are the searches your product pages, comparison articles and pricing pages were built to catch.

That is exactly where Google has pushed its AI summaries hardest. An earlier Semrush analysis of more than 600,000 keywords found that AI Overviews on commercial-intent searches grew 71% in six months, while transactional searches, the "buy now" type, actually saw a small decline. Google seems to have decided that the research stage of buying is where an AI answer helps most.

The same analysis found AI Overviews concentrate on expensive keywords. In finance, keywords with an AI Overview carried an average cost-per-click of $4.84 against $2.14 without one. The summaries are not spread evenly across search. They sit precisely on the queries businesses fight hardest, and pay most, to win.

The click problem nobody can ignore

An AI Overview answers the question before anyone scrolls to your link. The effect on clicks is well documented by now. A Pew Research study found users clicked a result on 8% of searches with an AI summary, against 15% without, roughly half. Seer Interactive measured a 61% fall in organic click-through rate on informational queries with AI Overviews, and a 68% fall for paid ads on the same pages. Ahrefs put the drop for the top-ranked organic result at 58%.

Until recently, business owners could read those numbers and shrug, because the summaries sat mostly on informational searches. The ranking that mattered, the commercial one, still delivered clicks the old way. The new coverage figures close that loophole. When 96% of "best X for Y" searches show an AI answer, the click decline arrives on the keywords that drive revenue.

It does not mean search traffic goes to zero. People still click through to compare details, check prices and buy. But the days of position one guaranteeing a predictable stream of visitors are over, and planning for next year on last year's click-through rates would be a mistake.

Who gets cited, and why it is not always you

Here is the part many brands underestimate. When an AI Overview summarises "your" comparison query, it builds the answer from sources it selects, and your website is only one candidate. Semrush gives a telling example: for "mailchimp vs klaviyo", the AI Overview cited Klaviyo's own guide on one side, but for Mailchimp it pulled from Zapier, a third party, plus a YouTube video.

In other words, a prospect can research your product, read a verdict about it and form an opinion without you having written a single word of what they saw. Review platforms, bloggers, YouTube creators and sometimes your competitors supply the narrative instead.

This changes what SEO work looks like. Ranking well still matters, because cited sources tend to be pages Google already trusts. But it is no longer sufficient to rank; you want to be the source the summary quotes. That favours pages with clear structure, direct answers, up-to-date numbers and honest comparisons, the sort of content an AI model can lift a clean sentence from.

What about paid search budgets

The paid side has its own puzzle. Google Ads and AI Overviews now appear together on the same results page about twice as often as a year ago, and the overlap is heaviest on high-cost keywords. So businesses are paying premium prices for clicks on pages where an AI answer is absorbing a good share of the attention.

That does not automatically mean cutting spend. Seer's data suggests ads lose clicks on AI Overview pages too, but an ad is still one of the few placements you fully control on such a page. The sensible response is measurement: separate your high-value keywords, check which ones now trigger an AI Overview, and compare cost per acquisition before and after. Some campaigns will still earn their keep. Others are quietly paying old prices for a smaller audience, and that budget belongs elsewhere, perhaps in content that can win citations instead.

Practical steps for your business

First, find out how exposed you are. Take your 20 or 30 most valuable commercial keywords and simply search them, or use a rank-tracking tool that flags AI Overviews. Note where a summary appears, who it cites and whether you are in it. For most businesses this audit takes an afternoon and changes the whole conversation.

Second, watch your analytics with fresh eyes. Impressions holding steady while clicks sag is the classic AI Overview signature. Set a baseline now so you can tell a seasonal dip from a structural one.

Third, make your commercial pages citation-friendly. Keep pricing pages current, publish honest comparison content against named competitors, answer the "best for" question directly near the top of the page, and use clear headings. If a summary is going to describe your product, give Google a well-structured first-party source to quote.

Fourth, invest where the summaries look. Reviews on platforms like G2, Capterra or Trustpilot, depending on your market, and video content both show up in citations regularly. A short, genuinely useful YouTube comparison can earn a place in an AI answer that your website alone might not get.

Finally, for teams building digital products, this is also a product decision. If search sends fewer visitors, owned channels get more valuable: email lists, communities, apps, anything that brings customers back without a Google search in between. We see more of our clients treating their website less as a traffic destination and more as the trusted source that feeds answers everywhere, and building retention channels alongside it.

Final notes

The Semrush numbers confirm what many site owners have felt in their analytics for months. AI Overviews are no longer an informational-search curiosity; at 88% of commercial keywords and climbing, they are the front door of buying research on Google.

The businesses that will come through fine are the ones that adapt early: audit exposure, measure honestly, write content worth citing and reduce their dependence on any single traffic source. None of it is exotic work, it is simply the new baseline. The window where you can treat this as optional is closing fast, and it is far cheaper to act now than to explain a traffic chart later.