Google’s A.I. Overviews now appear on 88 percent of commercial keywords in a fixed Semrush panel of 400 U.S. desktop queries, up from 45.75 percent a year earlier. The study, published Oct. 21 by Luke Harsel, content lead for Semrush’s product-led growth team, with contributor Nikola Manojlović, tracked five decision-stage modifiers from September 2025 through August 2026. Weighted by estimated monthly search volume, coverage reaches 97.08 percent.

That weighting matters. The 12 percent of keywords that still return a clean blue-link SERP account for less than 3 percent of actual search demand. The exception is a rounding error.

The modifier groups are the ones buyers type immediately before spending money: reviews, “best X for Y,” pricing and cost, “alternatives,” and brand-versus-brand. Review queries climbed 58.9 points, from 30.14 to 89.04 percent. “Best X for Y” rose 53.4 points to 96.12 percent. Pricing moved from 43.59 to 82.05 percent. “Alternatives” nearly doubled to 82.81 percent. Brand-versus-brand, which started highest at 63.41 percent, closed at 86.59. Every group ended above an 80 percent floor. Three cells (best-of banking, best-of software, and software alternatives) hit 100 percent on a keyword-weighted basis.

Industry spread has collapsed. Ecommerce climbed from 32.62 to 85.11 percent. Banking ended at 89 percent, software at 91, within six points of each other. The question of whether a vertical is “AI-exposed” is retired.

PPC Land flags a methodological caveat worth keeping in view: with fewer than 27 keywords per cell, a single query can swing a reading by three to five points. The direction and magnitude survive the caveat; a precise percentage inside any one cell doesn’t.

The downstream economics are already visible. Pew Research Center found users click a link 8 percent of the time when a summary appears, versus 15 percent without. Seer Interactive, studying 3,119 informational queries, measured a 61 percent fall in organic click-through rates where A.I. Overviews ran. Marie Haynes’ GA4 analysis of 100 sites over 12 months found ChatGPT accounts for 0.62 percent of Google’s organic search volume, while Google still drives 96.5 percent of conversions. The clicks aren’t migrating to chatbots. They’re being absorbed inside the result page.

For small businesses, the operative point is sourcing. Semrush’s sample summaries cite third-party pages like Zapier, EmailToolTester, and YouTube reviewers rather than the brands themselves. The first line of your brand’s story is now being written by someone else, and in most commercial categories it’s being read before the buyer ever reaches your site.

Adobe agreed to buy Semrush for $1.9 billion in November 2025, with the deal expected to close in the first half of 2026. The acquirer is paying for a measurement company whose own data documents the collapse of the surface it measures.

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