Michael Scott · 8 August 2026

Your Sector Decides How Much AI Search Hurts You

AI Overviews hit 88% of healthcare queries and just 4% of e-commerce. The 2026 data on AI Overview coverage by industry, what it does to clicks, and what to do about it.

There's a stat doing the rounds that AI Overviews now appear on half of all Google searches, and that clicks are collapsing as a result. Depending on what you sell, that's either an emergency or almost completely irrelevant to you.

Here's the number that should end the generic panic: AI Overviews appear on 88% of healthcare queries and about 4% of e-commerce queries. Same feature. Same search engine. Wildly different exposure.

So before you rewrite your content strategy, work out which of those two you actually are.

What the coverage data actually says

BrightEdge has tracked nine industries for a full year with its Generative Parser. The February 2026 numbers:

Healthcare: 88% of queries trigger an AI Overview, up from 72%
Education: 83%, up from 18%. A 361% increase in twelve months
B2B technology: 82%, up from 36%
Restaurants: 78%, up from 10%
Insurance: around 63%
E-commerce: around 4%, down from 29%

Read that last one again. E-commerce coverage went down, and sharply.

That isn't an accident. Google saturated the informational, advice-seeking queries where it earns relatively little ad revenue, and pulled back on the transactional queries where Shopping and paid search make it a fortune. Alphabet's Q4 2025 search revenue was $63.07 billion, up 17%. AI Overviews were never going to be allowed to eat that.

The practical read: if you sell a considered service and your customers research before buying, you're exposed. If you sell products and your customers search to buy, you're mostly protected. For now.

And how much do clicks actually fall?

This is where most coverage gets sloppy, so let's be precise.

Pew Research ran the cleanest behavioural study: 900 people, 68,879 real searches. When an AI Overview appeared, people clicked a traditional result 8% of the time, against 15% when there was no Overview. Only 1% clicked a link inside the Overview itself.

The most damning finding wasn't about clicks at all. 26% of users ended their browsing session entirely after seeing an AI Overview, against 16% without one. That traffic doesn't go to a competitor. It stops existing.

Seer Interactive's longitudinal study, which is the most rigorous I've seen at 2.43 billion impressions across 53 brands, tells a more hopeful story than the headlines. Organic CTR on AI Overview queries fell from 1.76% to 0.61% between June 2024 and September 2025, a 65% collapse. Then it recovered to 2.4% by February 2026.

So the floor was worse than people realised, and the recovery has been better than people realise. But the structural gap remains: queries with an Overview convert impressions to clicks about 37% less efficiently than queries without one. That gap is the new normal, and it's what you should plan around rather than the doom-laden collapse numbers from last autumn.

One important caveat before anyone quotes these at a board meeting: this is largely US data, including Google's own "roughly 50% of queries" disclosure. UK coverage patterns are broadly similar but not identical, and prevalence estimates vary from 15% to 50% depending on whose keyword set you use. Calibrate to your own portfolio, not to an industry average.

The finding almost nobody is talking about

Here's the one that changes how we work.

In mid-2024, roughly 76% of AI Overview citations came from pages ranking in the organic top 10. By February 2026, that had fallen to somewhere between 17% and 38%, depending on methodology.

Ranking on page one no longer predicts whether Google's AI quotes you.

That breaks an assumption most SEO has rested on for twenty years. You can hold position three and be invisible in the Overview sitting above you. You can rank nowhere near the top ten and be the source the AI quotes.

It also means the old measure of success, your ranking report, is now telling you less than half the story.

How to rank in AI Overviews

Being cited genuinely matters. Seer found brands cited inside an Overview get around 120% more organic clicks per impression than uncited brands on the same query. So how do you get there?

Answer the question in the first 30% of the page. SparkToro found 44.2% of citations come from the opening third of content. Seven in ten users only read the first few lines of an Overview. Front-load the answer, then elaborate. The long wind-up before the point is now actively costing you.

Keep content fresh. Pages updated within 30 days receive 3.2 times more AI citations than older ones. That single stat justifies a proper content refresh programme more convincingly than anything else I've read this year.

Get quoted where the AI already looks. YouTube accounts for around 23% of Overview citations, Wikipedia 18%, Reddit around 21%. Citation is heavily concentrated: the top 15 domains take 68% of the whole pool. Your website alone isn't the whole strategy.

Be genuinely useful about the thing you actually do. Brand-owned sites grew from 26% to 31% of citations in a year, and Google's Overviews favour brand-managed sources more than ChatGPT or Perplexity do. Clear, specific, first-hand expertise still wins.

What we'd do first

If you're in healthcare, education, B2B tech, restaurants, insurance or professional services, treat AI Overview visibility as a live commercial issue this quarter. Audit which of your queries trigger an Overview, check whether you're cited, and fix your top twenty pages first.

If you're in e-commerce, don't panic, but don't get comfortable either. Your protection exists because Google likes the ad revenue on your queries, not because your sector is special. That calculation can change, and ChatGPT's new shopping carousels suggest the pressure is coming from a different direction entirely.

And whichever camp you're in, add citation tracking to your reporting alongside rankings. If page one no longer guarantees you're quoted, your dashboard needs to show both.

That's exactly the work we're doing with clients right now. If you want to know where you stand, get in touch >>

Clicky™

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