Google's AI Overviews Now Appear in 43 Percent of Searches

Artificial intelligence has stopped being an add-on to Google Search and has become its default mode of operation. A new report from analytics firm Similarweb shows that AI-generated answers, known as AI Overviews, now appear in 43 percent of all searches, nearly three times more than a year ago.

What the numbers show

Similarweb bases its findings on a global analysis of traffic and user behavior, published periodically as a report on the generative AI landscape. The latest edition, covered by TechCrunch on July 27, shows that the share of search results featuring AI Overviews has grown far faster over the past year than was expected even in 2025.

At the same time, AI Mode, Google's fully conversational search mode that generates an extensive answer from multiple sources instead of a list of links, has been gaining popularity. Visits to this mode rose from 126 million in June 2025 to 279 million in May 2026, and according to announcements at the Google I/O 2026 conference, AI Mode's total user base has already surpassed one billion monthly users, with query volume doubling every quarter since launch.

Longer queries

Similarweb notes that the way people phrase their queries is also changing. Users are moving away from short, few-word searches toward elaborate, sentence-like questions that resemble a conversation with an assistant rather than a classic search query. This is a direct consequence of the habits formed by conversational interfaces like ChatGPT and other chatbots, now spilling over into traditional search as well.

The report also notes that the number of source citations in AI-generated answers has grown more than fivefold over the past year. By comparison, in March 2026 only 6.8 percent of desktop ChatGPT queries included any source citation at all, showing that Google, despite the criticism it faces, cites sources far more often than rival chatbots.

A cost for publishers

The growing share of AI Overviews comes at a cost for content creators, however. Similarweb's data shows that by May 2025, as many as 69 percent of news-related searches ended without a single click to a publisher's website, a 13 percentage point increase in the year since AI Overviews rolled out. Being cited as a source in an AI answer does not necessarily mean a user will actually visit the page the information came from.

This zero-click effect has been a point of contention between Google and news publishers for months, with some publishers already threatening to restrict the company's access to their content. Similarweb stresses that the problem hits news outlets hardest, since they traditionally built their traffic on search results.

Not all the changes work against publishers, though. Following the algorithm update of May 7, 2026, the share of visits generated by citations within AI answers rose from 25 to nearly 60 percent, suggesting Google is testing ways to partially offset the decline in classic organic traffic.

What it means for Polish businesses

For Polish companies and newsrooms that have been watching search traffic decline for months, the new data confirms the scale of the phenomenon on a global level. Optimizing for classic search results is no longer enough; growing attention is being paid to what's called generative engine optimization, adapting content so it gets cited and surfaced in AI-generated answers rather than just in traditional links.

The trend described by Similarweb also fits into a broader shift of the starting point for shopping and information searches, moving from classic search engines to conversational tools, a shift affecting large brands as well as local shops and service providers trying to build visibility online.

Similarweb says it plans further updates to the report in the coming months, tracking the growth of AI Mode and the further expansion of generated answers into new query categories, including shopping and local search.