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

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.

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.

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.

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%

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.