AI Overviews now show up on 88% of the commercial search keywords Semrush tracks, up from under half a year ago, according to a new study.
TL;DR: Semrush tracked 400 keywords across banking, software, and ecommerce every month from September 2025 through August 2026, focusing on five search patterns people use right before buying something: alternatives, brand versus brand, “best X for Y,” pricing, and reviews. Keyword-weighted AI Overview coverage went from 45.75% to 88% over that span, almost double. When weighted by estimated search volume instead, coverage hits 97%, meaning the small slice of keywords without an AI Overview barely registers in terms of actual search traffic.
The study, published by Semrush’s Luke Harsel with Nikola Manojlović as a contributor, tracked US desktop search results only, so treat the numbers as a snapshot of one market and one device type rather than a global figure that applies everywhere equally. Within that scope, though, the growth curve is hard to argue with.
Reviews saw the biggest jump of any category
Break the headline number down by search pattern and the differences get interesting. Reviews-related searches went from showing an AI Overview 30.14% of the time in September 2025 to 89.04% by August 2026, the largest swing in the study. “A year ago, the searches we tracked that included ‘reviews’ saw an AI Overview just 30% of the time,” the study notes. “Now, AI Overviews appear in those search results nearly 90% of the time.”
Brand-versus-brand searches had the smallest jump, moving from 63.41% to 86.59%, mostly because that category already started from a higher baseline than the others. “Best X for Y” queries climbed from 42.72% to 96.12%, the highest end point of any pattern in the study. Pricing and cost searches went from 43.59% to 82.05%, and general alternatives searches moved from 48.44% to 82.81%.
By industry, software led at 91% coverage by August 2026, banking followed close behind at 89%, and ecommerce, which started the lowest at 32.62%, climbed all the way to 85.11%. Of the fifteen industry-and-pattern combinations Semrush tracked, three hit 100% coverage by the end of the study: banking’s “best X for Y” searches, and both software categories in that same pattern group.
What the study doesn’t measure matters as much as what it does
Semrush is upfront that this study tracks appearance, not outcome. There’s no click data, no traffic numbers, and no conversion figures anywhere in it. The study measures whether an AI Overview showed up, not whether it helped or hurt the site that would have otherwise ranked first.
That gap matters because of what the study does say about how those overviews get built. One example cited in the research: an AI Overview answering “mailchimp vs klaviyo” pulled from Klaviyo’s own guide for one side of the comparison and from Zapier, a third party, for the other. “The answer people see when searching ‘[your brand] vs. [competitor]’ can draw on YouTube videos, reddit threads, and review sites, as well as your own site and your competitor’s,” the study notes. Ranking first doesn’t guarantee you’re the source the AI Overview actually cites.
Semrush, which Adobe agreed to acquire for $1.9 billion back in November 2025, has published on this trend before. An earlier July study tracked more than 600,000 keywords and found a 71% average increase in commercial-intent AI Overview appearances between November 2025 and April 2026. The new 400-keyword study is narrower but goes deeper on specific buying-intent patterns rather than commercial intent broadly.
Related: This comes right after Google’s own clarification on what robots.txt actually controls, which matters more now that AI-generated answers are touching nearly every commercial search. It also lines up with the skepticism raised in recent research questioning whether AI-visibility tracking tools are stable enough to budget around yet.
What this means for anyone doing commercial SEO right now
If your traffic depends on buyer-intent keywords, pricing pages, comparison content, or review roundups, the practical move is to stop measuring success purely by ranking position and start checking what the AI Overview for your highest-value keywords actually says, and who it’s citing to say it. The Mailchimp-versus-Klaviyo example in the study is a useful gut check: run your own brand’s comparison queries and see whether the AI Overview pulls from your site, a competitor’s, or a third party like a review aggregator or forum thread neither brand controls.
Reviews content deserves particular attention given it posted the single biggest jump in the study, nearly 60 percentage points of added coverage in a year. If your site publishes product reviews, roundups, or “best of” content, that category is now more likely than not to get summarized by an AI Overview before a reader clicks through to any individual source, including yours. The response isn’t to stop publishing that content. It’s to make sure it’s structured clearly enough, with specific claims, named products, and concrete numbers, that an AI system pulling from it attributes the information accurately rather than blending it into a generic summary that erases which source said what.
The bottom line
The direction of this trend isn’t in question anymore. Whether you sell software, run a bank, or list products on an ecommerce site, the odds that a buyer-intent search triggers an AI Overview before they ever see your listing have roughly doubled in a year. What Semrush’s study can’t tell you is whether that AI Overview sends them to your site or just answers their question and ends the search there. Until someone publishes click-through data to go with the coverage numbers, treat “we’re cited in the AI Overview” as a visibility metric, not a traffic guarantee.
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