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Insights From 55.8M AI Overviews Across 590M Searches—A Study by Ahrefs

Insights From 55.8M AI Overviews Across 590M Searches—A Study by Ahrefs

According to Google, AI Overviews (AIOs) had over 1.5 billion users a month in Q1 2025. That would be 18.3% of all the people on the planet or 26.6% of all internet users. That’s a massive reach.

In traditional Ahrefs fashion, I wanted to do the largest data study ever done on AIOs to see what we could learn and share with the marketing community. For a twist on most studies, I’ve shown how they compare to search queries overall.

As a bonus, I’ll show you how you can pull the numbers yourself any time you want updated data.

Let’s dig into the data.

AIOs are showing more than ever. They’re reducing clicks by 34.5%. And yet, most of the queries they’re showing for are informational queries that people weren’t bidding on.

At the very least, AIOs aren’t likely to impact Google’s bottom line. I wonder how much they will impact companies? Companies investing in their content are also the most likely to show for AIOs. Some may even benefit from them, but the vast majority, I think, will lose traffic. We’ll have to see how it plays out.

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.

See all keywords with AIOs in Ahrefs Brand Radar

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.

Ahrefs organic search traffic index keyword numbers

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.

AIO impressions from Brand Radar

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 feel like I need to quickly explain some differences.

Some quick math on our numbers. 180 million monthly searches * 12 months = 2.16 trillion searches a year in our data. That’s less than the 5 trillion Google says.

To try to explain the difference, there are many low-volume searches that Google classifies as anonymous queries. According to Google, 15% of searches have never been searched before. When we looked at GSC data a few years ago, 46.08% of queries were anonymous.

2.16 trillion (our yearly search numbers) / 0.54 (non-anonymous query %) = 4 trillion searches. That’s in the ballpark. Any further differences could be because anonymous queries increased, we have some gaps in our keyword database, or our volume estimates are a bit low.

Sidenote.

I do suspect the number of anonymous queries has increased and will increase further. People’s search behaviour has changed and they’re searching with much longer queries than they used to.

Google no longer has a max word count when searching. It used to be 32 words max, but now you can have as many as you want until the max URL limit is reached.

Keywords Explorer, you can do a blank search and get all the data for a country. If you filter by “SERP features” to “On SERP” > “AI Overview”, then you can see the total number of AIOs in our data. 24.8M for the US at the time of writing.

Keywords Explorer filtered to only keywords with AIOs in the US

You can further filter by different data points like Intent to see more information about the type of terms where AIOs are showing.

Keywords Explorer filtered to AIOs and Informational intent in the US

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%
AIO distribution vs normal search distribution by search intent
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.

Use the web index to see brand mentions on webpages

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.

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