Where and Why Google’s AI Overviews Appear: A Study of 2.3m Keywords
“Come gather ’round, people, wherever you roam, and admit that the waters around you have grown…” – Bob Dylan
Search marketers can feel those rising waters as Google’s AI Overviews continue to flood the results pages in 2025. Pressured by LLM rivals like ChatGPT and users who expect instant answers, Google’s response is simple: Show the answer itself in the search results as often as possible.
How often? 25.8 % of 2.37 million US queries we analyzed surfaced an AI Overview box. We’ve spent time crunching the data to understand exactly where, when, and why Google’s AI Overviews appear. The results reveal that getting answers instead of website visits is rapidly becoming the new normal for certain types of searches.
Three accelerators – long queries, informational intent, trust‑heavy industries – push the odds of an AI Overview up. And we also found two factors that drastically reduce the likelihood of AI overviews: local or brand modifiers and visual commerce queries.
