Based on Google, AI Overviews (AIOs) had over 1.5 billion customers a month in Q1 2025. That may be 18.3% of all of the individuals on the planet or 26.6% of all web customers. That’s an enormous attain.
In conventional Ahrefs style, I wished to do the biggest knowledge examine ever finished on AIOs to see what we may be taught and share with the advertising and marketing group. For a twist on most research, I’ve proven how they examine to go looking queries general.
As a bonus, I’ll present you how one can pull the numbers your self any time you need up to date knowledge.
Let’s dig into the knowledge.
Right here’s a fast take a look at a number of the greatest takeaways:
- AIOs present for 9.46% of all key phrases on Desktop, 16% within the US
- AIOs present for 54.61% or extra of all Google searches by quantity
- The high 50 domains have 28.90% of all mentions
- AIOs present greater than regular for informational queries, longer search queries, and queries with greater search volumes
- AIOs present up lower than regular for branded queries, native queries, and shorter search queries
- AIOs largely present on non-monetized searches
AIOs are displaying greater than ever. They’re lowering clicks by 34.5%. And but, a lot of the queries they’re displaying for are informational queries that individuals weren’t bidding on.
On the very least, AIOs aren’t more likely to affect Google’s backside line. I ponder how a lot they are going to affect firms? Firms investing of their content material are additionally the most probably to indicate for AIOs. Some could even profit from them, however the overwhelming majority, I feel, will lose visitors. We’ll need to see the way it performs out.
You are able to do a clean search in Brand Radar to see how many AIOs we’ve seen for the SERPs Ahrefs uses to build our traffic estimates. The line chart shows the trend over time, including the huge increase in their presence in March 2025.
AIOs show for 9.46% of all keywords, but they haven’t fully rolled out
At the time of writing, we have ~55.8 million AIOs from Desktop search results. This is out of 590M total keywords used to build our organic search traffic index, ~9.46% of the total. You can refer to our Big Data page at any time to get the current number of keywords in our index and the number for each country.
AIOs show for 54.61% or more of all searches by volume
You can switch the tab to Impressions to see the total search volume for all the terms showing AIOs, or their total visibility. As of writing, it’s ~98.3 billion total volume out of ~180 billion total monthly searches in our index. 54.61% of all Google searches are showing AIOs.
Sidenote.
Our data undercounts the total number of search terms and impressions for AIOs. We don’t pull SERPs for one-off or low volume queries to build our traffic index, but AIOs do show on many of these queries. We also pull AIO data from logged-out users, when they’re more likely to show to logged-in users. Many countries still don’t show them to logged-out users yet. It wouldn’t surprise me if AIOs are showing for more than 75% of all Google searches by volume.
Ahrefs and Google by the numbers
Because I don’t want anyone directly comparing our numbers to Google’s number where they say there are over 5 trillion searches annually, I really feel like I must shortly clarify some variations.
Some fast math on our numbers. 180 million month-to-month searches * 12 months = 2.16 trillion searches a 12 months in our knowledge. That’s lower than the 5 trillion Google says.
To attempt to clarify the distinction, there are numerous low-volume searches that Google classifies as nameless queries. Based on Google, 15% of searches have never been searched before. Once we checked out GSC knowledge just a few years in the past, 46.08% of queries had been nameless.
2.16 trillion (our yearly search numbers) / 0.54 (non-anonymous question %) = 4 trillion searches. That’s within the ballpark. Any additional variations may very well be as a result of nameless queries elevated, we’ve some gaps in our key phrase database, or our quantity estimates are a bit low.
Sidenote.
I do suspect the variety of nameless queries has elevated and can improve additional. Individuals’s search behaviour has modified they usually’re looking with for much longer queries than they used to.
Google now not has a max phrase depend when looking. It was once 32 phrases max, however now you possibly can have as many as you need till the max URL restrict is reached.
AIOs had a staggered rollout. You’ll be able to see country-level knowledge by altering the nation within the dropdown in Model Radar.
AIOs present for 16% of all US key phrases on Desktop
AIOs present for ~24.9 million out of 156 million search phrases in our US natural search visitors index, ~16% of the full searches.
You’ll be able to simply calculate this quantity for every nation with the mentions knowledge above and divide that by the full variety of the Huge Information web page. India 16.5%, Brazil 15.5%, UK 12.5%, and so forth.
Sidenote.
Should you see many nations with out AIOs, it’s as a result of they don’t have AIOs but or don’t have them for logged-out customers.
You should utilize the domains tab in Model Radar to see what domains are talked about in AIOs over time. We’ll have a filter for this shortly, however proper now you possibly can see the domains which have the best share of AIOs.
The highest 50 domains have 28.9% of all AIO mentions
AIOs are dominated by high websites. Whereas many individuals report dropping clicks to AIOs, I wouldn’t be shocked if many of those websites had been really benefiting from them.
| Area | Mentions | Impressions |
|---|---|---|
| reddit.com | 2,971,746 | 1,881,884,930 |
| en.wikipedia.org | 2,920,525 | 13,910,509,832 |
| quora.com | 2,276,494 | 618,988,629 |
| youtube.com | 2,063,355 | 3,577,707,498 |
| nih.gov | 1,288,730 | 3,124,783,852 |
| mayoclinic.org | 1,316,872 | 6,159,726,120 |
| clevelandclinic.org | 1,109,623 | 5,098,852,777 |
| translate.google.com | 857,892 | 4,465,811,843 |
| healthline.com | 979,908 | 2,236,792,358 |
| webmd.com | 917,464 | 2,190,526,123 |
| apple.com | 441,986 | 680,920,972 |
| es.wikipedia.org | 597,865 | 5,223,350,730 |
| microsoft.com | 464,330 | 986,660,551 |
| medicalnewstoday.com | 573,680 | 1,188,183,953 |
| www.nhs.uk | 493,760 | 2,507,074,568 |
| medlineplus.gov | 473,850 | 2,721,231,563 |
| fb.com | 438,867 | 446,833,096 |
| instagram.com | 441,136 | 746,231,176 |
| certainly.com | 359,963 | 553,924,993 |
| help.google.com | 297,335 | 522,568,488 |
| brainly.com | 264,347 | 23,764,810 |
| britannica.com | 297,924 | 2,497,564,834 |
| testbook.com | 229,035 | 84,720,146 |
| amazon.com | 238,838 | 523,926,930 |
| alodokter.com | 199,193 | 278,035,342 |
| merriam-webster.com | 256,994 | 3,170,311,903 |
| examine.com | 248,252 | 558,343,910 |
| msdmanuals.com | 242,777 | 651,464,581 |
| sciencedirect.com | 242,799 | 662,899,861 |
| uol.com.br | 199,395 | 284,636,935 |
| kumparan.com | 184,165 | 116,489,768 |
| justanswer.com | 183,094 | 17,821,281 |
| byjus.com | 196,500 | 377,110,507 |
| cambridge.org | 192,555 | 3,041,651,028 |
| verywellhealth.com | 195,389 | 167,090,643 |
| detik.com | 166,645 | 127,771,207 |
| indiatimes.com | 161,599 | 264,059,019 |
| investopedia.com | 161,975 | 660,434,615 |
| pt.wikipedia.org | 163,875 | 1,069,981,476 |
| kidshealth.org | 161,776 | 441,933,241 |
| fandom.com | 145,761 | 519,074,759 |
| wiktionary.org | 159,394 | 820,932,071 |
| tuasaude.com | 146,483 | 175,433,902 |
| imdb.com | 138,758 | 345,263,254 |
| stackexchange.com | 140,760 | 45,714,814 |
| rae.es | 127,392 | 1,166,423,287 |
| cdc.gov | 130,112 | 621,061,238 |
| linkedin.com | 130,896 | 308,787,699 |
| hopkinsmedicine.org | 136,577 | 645,290,307 |
| petmd.com | 129,065 | 108,308,035 |
For these 50 websites, listed below are the classes and their share of general mentions:
- Information & Reference – 4.4%
- Well being & Medical – 5.8%
- Q&A & Group Dialogue – 5.9%
- Video & Social Media – 3.4%
- Search & Translation Instruments – 1.2%
- Training & Studying – 1.3%
- Information & Media – 0.6%
- E-Commerce & Tech – 1.1%
- Job & Profession – 0.4%
- Regional & Localized Well being – 0.4%
You’ll be able to filter the dataset to be extra particular to your trade. Examine the area tabs to see how competing websites are performing. For instance, right here I’ve filtered to search for key phrases or AI Overviews containing “web site builder”.
One other method of doing that is to make use of the complete dataset, however use the “Discover mentions of manufacturers, merchandise, or providers” filter. Enter 1 or 2 and use “Counsel extra” to make use of AI to get a number of the competing firms or merchandise.
The share and attain studies offers you Share of Voice (SoV) for mentions and impressions.
You can further filter by different data points like Intent to see more information about the type of terms where AIOs are showing.
For example, for the above search I got 24.3M keywords for Informational intent out of 24.8M total for the US. That’s 97.70% of the total.
Remember that searches can have more than 1 intent. Here’s a breakdown with the current numbers:
- Informational: 97.70%
- Navigational: 1.23%
- Commercial: 12.86%
- Transactional: 2.85%
You’ll be able to filter Key phrases Explorer as described above to AIOs on the SERP + Branded or Non-Branded intents. On the time of writing I received the next percentages:
- Branded: 19.97%
- Non-branded: 80.03%
AIOs are much less more likely to present up for branded searches.
You’ll be able to filter Key phrases Explorer as described above to AIOs on the SERP and Native or Non-Native intents. On the time of writing, I received the next percentages:
- Native: 6.85%
- Non-Native: 93.15%
AIOs are much less more likely to present up for native searches.
Filtering Key phrases Explorer to SERPs with AIOs and filtering by phrase depend tells an attention-grabbing story. AIOs have a larger illustration when longer search queries.
I filtered Key phrases Explorer to SERPs with AIOs and filtered by Key phrase Issue (KD). It appears like AIOs are most probably to indicate on decrease KD phrases, however that’s fairly regular within the dataset.
I filtered Key phrases Explorer to SERPs with AIOs and filtered by Search Quantity. This one shocked me. I used to be anticipating AIOs to be over-represented in decrease quantity queries.
I see AIOs usually once I’m looking long-tail queries, particularly ones that I feel are fairly distinctive queries. This wasn’t mirrored within the knowledge, nevertheless it might be biased as we don’t embrace most of the queries like I described in our search visitors index.
Filtering Key phrases Explorer to SERPs with AIOs and filtering by Value-Per-Click on (CPC), or the price of an advert click on, exhibits a slight bias for decrease CPC phrases.
What’s extra attention-grabbing is that 71.67% of the searches with AIOs had no CPC knowledge. This means a majority of the AIO searches weren’t monetized in any respect. It’s no marvel nobody has seen adverts in AIOs but. They aren’t displaying for almost all of the phrases that make Google cash.
One of many distinctive issues about Ahrefs Brand Radar is that we also have web pages as a data source. With this, you can see which brands are mentioned the most online and which have the most visibility. This can help you explain why a competitor might show up more than you do for AIOs or other LLMs.
LLMs work as next word predictors with a bit of variability built in. If you’re mentioned more in the training data such as web pages, you’re going to be mentioned more in the outputs of LLMs.
Final thoughts
Don’t wait for the next big study if you need to report what is happening with AIOs. You can run the data yourself with Ahrefs at any time with Brand Radar and Keywords Explorer.
If you have questions, message me on X or LinkedIn.
