AI Overviews — Google’s AI-generated summary that appears above the traditional results for some queries, with links to the sources it drew on.
Being cited is not the same as ranking
Ahrefs analysed 863,000 keywords and roughly four million AI Overview URLs in March 2026. Of the pages cited, 38% ranked in Google’s top ten. Another 31.2% ranked between 11 and 100. And 31% came from pages ranking beyond position 100 — or not ranking at all.
Ahrefs attributes part of the change from their earlier figure to improved parsing on their own side, so treat it as a direction rather than a precise measurement. The direction is the point: query fan-out pulls in sources that would never have surfaced for the original query.
Source: Ahrefs, March 2026, via Search Engine Journal.
Not the same as AI Mode
AI Overviews appear above the normal blue links on a standard results page. Google AI Mode is a separate tab and a separate conversational experience. People conflate them constantly; they behave differently and should be measured separately.
Related: Google AI Mode, zero-click search.