“Over half of Google searches now show an AI Overview.” We hear this constantly. It shows up in decks, in pitches, in other agencies’ blog posts. We checked it directly. It isn’t true.
The real, confirmed number is 25.11%. Roughly 1 in 4 searches, not more than half.
Where This Number Comes From
Conductor analyzed 5.5 million of 21.9 million searches, across 13,770 enterprise domains in 10 industries. That’s a real sample size, a named methodology, and a report you can read yourself. Pew Research, working independently with its own non-vendor methodology, found 18% in the same general window. Two different organizations, two different methods, landing close together. That’s what a confirmed number looks like.
Pew researchers Athena Chapekis and Anna Lieb put the click-behavior finding directly: “Google users who encountered an AI summary clicked on a traditional search result link in 8% of all visits. Those who did not encounter an AI summary clicked on a search result nearly twice as often.” Their prevalence read, “around one-in-five Google searches in March 2025 produced an AI summary,” lines up with Conductor’s number almost exactly.
What We Checked, and What Failed
We went looking for every version of the “over half” claim before writing this. None of them held up.
Every figure above 50% traced back to a secondary aggregator, not an original, locatable study. Here's what we checked and why each one failed.
The pattern repeats: a number appears in one compilation post, gets copied into a dozen others, and eventually reads as established fact because it’s everywhere. It’s everywhere because nobody traced it back to where it started. We did, and at the source, it isn’t there.
Why the Real Number Still Matters
Twenty-five percent isn’t a small number. It’s still a real compression of organic click volume, still growing, still worth building a strategy around. It just isn’t the crisis-level “half of everything” framing that gets repeated to sell urgency.
The variance underneath the average matters too. Conductor’s data shows Healthcare at 48.75% AI Overview prevalence and Real Estate at 4.48%, both folded into that one 25.11% figure. A firm in a high-triggering vertical is closer to the inflated claim than the average suggests. A firm in a low-triggering one is nowhere close. The average hides both.
What This Says About Who You’re Working With
A vendor repeating the 60% or 48% claim either didn’t check it or didn’t care to. Either way, it’s a signal. The firms and agencies still citing unconfirmed AI Overview stats in 2026 are running on secondhand numbers, and that’s exactly the habit that produces bad strategy. We’ve seen what happens when SEO decisions get made on numbers nobody verified.
We won’t hand a client an invented number. Not because it’s a compliance line, because a wrong number produces a wrong plan, and the plan is the part that costs money. Twenty-five percent, corroborated two ways, checked at the source. That’s the number to build on.