When a search report says AI Overviews appear on 88% of your commercial keywords, ask for the second number before you plan around the first.
One panel, two answers
Semrush’s October 21 study followed 400 commercial keywords in banking, software and ecommerce for twelve months. In August 2026, AI Overviews appeared on 88% of them when every keyword counted equally. Weighted by estimated monthly search volume, the figure was 97.08%. The 12% of keywords with no AI Overview made up less than 3% of the search volume in the dataset.
I think the second figure belongs in the planning deck, because it describes where the demand is. A team that reads 88% will be tempted to sort its keyword list into affected and safe, and to assume the safe group holds its clicks. In this panel that safe group was under 3% of the volume. A plan that leans on it protects very little traffic.
Here is the arithmetic with invented round numbers, which are not Semrush data. Take a site that tracks 100 commercial keywords with 1,000,000 combined monthly searches. If the 88 keywords with an AI Overview carry 97% of that volume, as Semrush’s volume-weighted figure implies for its panel, they account for 970,000 searches and the other 12 keywords for 30,000. Content effort routed to those 12 keywords goes to the corner of the list where few people search.
The strongest objection
The obvious objection is that this is one vendor’s panel. Semrush sells AI visibility tracking, the October panel is 400 keywords on U.S. desktop data, and the volumes are estimates. Those limits are real, and I would not copy 97.08% into a forecast.
The direction holds up anyway. A July study from the same company covered more than 600,000 keywords in ten industries and found commercial-intent AI Overviews up 71% in six months. Two panels of very different size point the same way, so the case for asking about weighting does not rest on the small one. What I take from the October study is a question to put to a vendor, and the 97.08% only shows why the question matters.
Why the question matters now
Semrush’s June index found that 45% of marketing leaders cannot accurately measure their brand visibility in AI-generated answers. Rachel Thornton, CMO of Adobe Enterprise, said in that release: “Your AI narrative is becoming the decisive entry point to your customer experience.” When measurement is that thin, the first number a tool shows tends to become the number in the deck, and the headline percentage of keywords is the easiest one to produce. Related arguments are in Ask Marketing Analytics Vendors for Lead Time Before Explanations and Measurement Disputes Are Moving From the Number to the Definition, which both turn on the definition behind a metric.
The paid side makes the same case
Semrush’s July study found Google Ads and AI Overviews on the same results page about twice as often as a year earlier. It also found that AI Overviews appeared most often in the most expensive keyword tier in nearly every industry, and that in finance the keywords with an AI Overview averaged $4.84 in cost per click against $2.14 for those without. I would not read that as proof that AI Overviews raise or lower the return on a click, because the study reports averages and runs no causal test. It is a reason to ask paid search owners to bring the same weighted coverage figure to the budget meeting, since the queries where advertisers compete hardest are, in this data, often the ones that also show an AI Overview.
What to ask for
Ask your SEO vendor or agency for four things on your own keyword list, not a sample panel.
- AI Overview coverage by keyword count and by search volume, side by side.
- The monthly trend over at least a year, so a seasonal spike does not pass for a shift.
- The sources the AI Overview cites on your brand-versus-competitor searches.
- How the volume estimates are produced and how often they are refreshed.
If the vendor can only supply the keyword count, that tells you what the report was built to show. Put both figures in the next quarterly review, and size any traffic forecast on the one that follows the demand.
Source: Semrush
