In September 2024, Google showed an AI Overview on 5.9% of the US search results in DataForSEO’s tracking panel. By August 2026 it was 61.4%. That is the single most consequential chart in Search Insider 2026, DataForSEO’s annual study of 190 million keywords, 165 million AI answers and 1.1 billion backlinks, and it is buried on page 12 as a static image.
The study’s appendices publish the full data tables behind every chart, so we have rebuilt the ones that matter as interactive charts and pulled out what they mean in practice. Every chart below is live: hover, toggle and switch to explore the numbers. One scope note before them: the search and AI answer data is US and English only. We cover why that still matters to UK sites near the end.
Contents
- AI Overviews took over in 24 months
- Where clicks go when an AI Overview appears
- Desktop CTR has halved at the top
- No keyword trait protects you
- Your industry sets your exposure
- Google and ChatGPT cite different webs
- What this means for UK sites
AI Overviews took over in 24 months
SERP feature presence on US Google. Click a legend entry to isolate a line. Data: DataForSEO Search Insider 2026, Table A4.
The tenfold rise in AI Overviews is only half the story. Featured snippets, the format SEOs spent a decade optimising for, collapsed from 9% of results to 0.4% over the same two years. They were not displaced gradually; the monthly data shows them sliding every single month once AI Overviews began scaling in March 2025.
Video results tell a stranger story. They sat between 5% and 11% for a year, then jumped to 31% in October 2025 before settling around 20 to 25%. Whatever Google tested that month, the end state is that video now appears in twice as many results as it did two years ago. Local packs, meanwhile, held steady at around 20 to 26% throughout. The traditional SERP is not shrinking evenly: it is being rebuilt around AI answers, video and maps.
Where clicks go when an AI Overview appears
Estimated click share, with and without an AI Overview. Switch the intent to compare. Data: DataForSEO Search Insider 2026, Table A3.
When an AI Overview is present, its citation links take an estimated 42 to 45% of clicks, and the top organic result’s share falls from 33 to 38% down to 21 to 24%. Positions 2 to 10 lose roughly 36 to 42% of their combined share.
The detail worth sitting with is how uniform this is. Informational, navigational, transactional and commercial queries all land within three percentage points of each other. There is no intent where ranking first still pays what it used to once the AI answer shows. These are modelled estimates from clickstream data rather than observed clicks, which the study is upfront about, but the consistency across intents is hard to dismiss.
Desktop CTR has halved at the top
Monthly organic CTR by position. Toggle desktop and mobile; the scale stays fixed so the gap is honest. Data: DataForSEO Search Insider 2026, Table A2.
Across a separate panel of 2,000+ websites’ search performance data, desktop CTR for position 1 fell from 17.8% to 7.4% in twelve months. Position 2 fell from 15.3% to 3.1%. Mobile barely moved: position 1 eased from 25.2% to 20.8% and position 2 actually rose slightly.
That device split matters for diagnosis. If your clicks are falling while your rankings hold, segment by device before you blame your content. A desktop-heavy B2B site has likely lost far more to the SERP itself than a mobile-heavy consumer one, and the fix is different in each case.
No keyword trait protects you
AI Overview trigger rate by keyword trait, one tab each. Data: DataForSEO Search Insider 2026, Tables B1 to B4.
The study tests the obvious escape routes and closes each one. Mid-difficulty keywords (KD 21 to 60) trigger AI Overviews most, at around 65%. The cheapest keywords and the £4-plus-per-click ones trigger them at nearly identical rates, 50.5% versus 49.6%. Low-volume keywords are slightly more exposed than high-volume ones, not less.
The sharpest movement is by intent: commercial queries nearly doubled their trigger rate in a year, from 26% to 51%. The “AI Overviews only affect informational content” position was defensible in 2025. It is not now.
Your industry sets your exposure
AI Overview trigger rate by industry. Pick an industry for its full readout. Data: DataForSEO Search Insider 2026, Tables B5, C1 and C2.
The one variable that genuinely separates sites is industry. Health searches trigger AI Overviews 69.7% of the time, Finance 68.8%, Family & Community 68.6%. At the other end, Real Estate sits at 22.3% and Dining & Nightlife at 29.4%. That is a 47-point spread between sectors, against single-digit spreads for difficulty, price and volume.
A US industry average is a starting point, not your number. Your actual exposure depends on your specific keywords, which is exactly what the free exposure check in our AI Answer Monitor measures: it scans the searches that matter to you and reports how often AI answers appear and who gets cited in them.
Google and ChatGPT cite different webs
Most-cited domains in each system. Pick a domain to see where it ranks in the other column. Data: DataForSEO Search Insider 2026, Table C3.
Visibility in one AI system does not transfer to another. Google’s AI Overviews lean on video and community platforms: YouTube leads with 51.9 million citations, and six of the top ten are social or community sites. ChatGPT leans on reference sources: Wikipedia and Reddit lead, with Britannica, NIH and news publishers filling the list. YouTube, first in Google’s ranking, sits nineteenth in ChatGPT’s.
Two more numbers worth knowing. Reddit appears in the top 10 organic results for 32% of all searches in the panel, and it is the second most cited domain in both AI systems. And 27.3% of ChatGPT answers cite no sources at all, against 0.7% for AI Overviews. If you have run a prompt check and seen no citations anywhere, that is not a measurement failure: roughly a quarter of ChatGPT answers name nobody. Checking a specific prompt across both systems is what the Check a prompt tab is for.
What this means for UK sites
Every search statistic above describes US English results; only the backlink analysis is global. So treat the numbers as a preview rather than a mirror. Google ships AI search features to the US first and the UK follows, usually within months: AI Overviews themselves launched in the US in May 2024 and reached the UK that August. The direction of travel is the same, the dates shift.
The practical reading for a UK site is that the US curve shows you the end state while you still have time to act on it. Measure your exposure before the curve catches up, and treat any tool or report quoting these figures as describing where UK SERPs are heading, not precisely where they are today.
What to do with this
Three actions fall out of the data. First, measure your own exposure rather than assuming your sector’s average applies to you. Second, segment CTR analysis by device before drawing conclusions, because desktop and mobile are now different worlds. Third, rethink what a ranking is worth when you forecast: if a top position earns roughly half the desktop clicks it did a year ago, catching your demand peak matters more, not less. That timing question is the one our Search Seasonality tool exists to answer.
All six charts live together on one page at tools.datahit.co/click-economy, each with the table behind it, if you want to explore or share them. If you want the full study, it is free from DataForSEO.
