Google’s AI Overviews now appear on 88% of the commercial keywords Semrush tracked for a year, up from 45.75% in September 2025, according to a Semrush study published on October 21. Weighted by search volume, coverage reached 97.08% in August 2026, meaning the small share of tracked keywords without a summary accounted for less than 3% of the panel’s search demand.
The panel was fixed and narrow by design: 400 US commercial keywords on desktop, split across banking, software and ecommerce, and across five modifier groups that searchers use close to a buying decision — alternatives, brand-versus-brand, best-X-for-Y, pricing and reviews. Semrush checked every month from September 2025 to August 2026 whether each keyword triggered an AI Overview.
AI Overviews Coverage By Modifier: Reviews Moved Furthest
Every modifier group finished the year above 80%. Reviews moved furthest, from 30.14% in September 2025 to 89.04% in August 2026 — a rise of 58.90 points that took review queries from the least likely group to trigger a summary to the second most likely. Best-X-for-Y queries finished highest at 96.12%, up 53.40 points. Alternatives reached 82.81%, pricing and cost queries 82.05%, and brand-versus-brand queries 86.59%.
Brand comparisons tell the opposite story on growth. They started the year highest, at 63.41%, and grew least, by 23.18 points. The gap between the groups narrowed sharply over the year, from a spread of more than 33 points in September 2025 to a range of 82.05% to 96.12% in August 2026.
AI Overviews Coverage By Industry: Three Verticals Converged
The three industries converged even faster. In September 2025 coverage ranged from 32.62% in ecommerce to 68% in software, a spread of more than 35 points. By August 2026 all three sat above 85% — software at about 91%, banking at about 89% and ecommerce at 85.11% — with less than six points between highest and lowest. Ecommerce posted the largest increase of the three.
Crossing the three industries with the five modifiers gives 15 combinations. By August 2026, 12 of them had coverage of at least 80% and three had reached 100%: best-X-for-Y in banking, alternatives in software and best-X-for-Y in software. Three stayed below 80% — alternatives in banking at 65%, pricing in ecommerce at 71.43% and reviews in software at 75% — and all 15 finished higher than they started. Ecommerce pricing keywords rose from 4.76% to 71.43%, and banking review keywords from 13.79% to 89.66%.
What The AI Overview Cites On A Comparison Search
Semrush illustrated the citation pattern with the query “mailchimp vs klaviyo”. The summary cited Klaviyo’s own guide for the “Choose Klaviyo if…” case, but cited a third-party site, Zapier, for the “Choose Mailchimp if you run a general small business…” case, with a YouTube video and another third-party site also prominent. The study’s point is that the answer a searcher reads for a brand-versus-rival query can be built from review sites, videos and community threads as well as from either brand’s own page.
The study has clear limits, which Semrush and its coverage both note. It records whether a summary appeared, not clicks, traffic or conversions. It covers US desktop results only, does not publish how many of the 400 keywords sit in each group, and its volume figures rest on Semrush’s own modelled search-volume estimates. It follows Semrush’s earlier July study, which reported commercial-intent coverage growing 71% on average between November 2025 and April 2026 across a much larger panel — a different sample and period, pointing the same way. The shift also sits alongside Google’s own redesign of links inside its AI answers, covered in our report on Google moving links higher in AI Overviews and AI Mode.
Why It Matters
AI Overviews reaching 88% of tracked commercial keywords changes what a comparison, pricing or review page is for. Those pages were built to be the first thing a buyer reads; now a Google summary built from several sources usually sits above them, and the brand’s own page is one input among several — as the work of tracking visibility inside AI answers and the wider generative engine optimisation field has been showing from the answer side. For publishers and advertisers, the practical task Semrush sets out is to track which sources the summaries cite for their money queries and keep those pages current, because the summary — not the ranking — now makes the first impression on most decision-stage searches in this panel.
Background
AI Overviews launched as Google’s AI-generated summary layer above ordinary search results and expanded steadily from informational queries toward commercial ones through 2025 and 2026. Semrush, now an Adobe company, sells the visibility tracking its study recommends, an interest readers can weigh alongside the data; its fixed-panel method makes this a measure of decision-stage queries in three verticals, not of all Google searches.
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