8.64% of AI Overviews Appear Outside Position #1 (And as Low as Position #6)
By Patrick Stox
Technical SEO at Ahrefs
AI Overviews aren’t always in the first position in the SERPs.
For example, here’s an AI Overview in the 2nd position.
See where AI Overviews appear outside of position 1
You can use the SERP features filter along with the Position filter to find some of the AI Overviews outside the top position. Head to Ahrefs' Site Explorer, navigate to the Organic keywords report and copy these filters:
I asked our awesome data scientist Xibeijia Guan to find out how often they show in different positions. She pulled 10M SERPs with AI Overviews total, 1M per country across 10 different countries in July 2025.
AI Overviews show outside of position 1 for 8.64% of queries. The lowest position we saw them was 6th.
We also noticed slight differences in countries, with Japan and Spain having more AI Overviews outside of position 1.
Right now there aren’t a lot of AI Overviews showing outside the 1st position, but it does seem like Google is willing to rank some of them lower. It makes me wonder if they have some kind of scoring for how good the generated AI Overview result is.
I’m also curious if they start ranking them outside of position 1 more often, or if they decide to go back to all of them being in position 1.
Patrick Stox is an independent SEO consultant. Former Product Advisor, Technical SEO, and Brand Ambassador at Ahrefs. Before that he was a Technical SEO at IBM for many years, worked at an agency, had his own consultancy, and was in-house at a B2B company. A long time ago he started his career as a developer.
He’s an organizer for the Triangle SEO Meetup, the Tech SEO Connect conference, he runs a Technical SEO Slack group, and is a moderator for /r/TechSEO on Reddit.
Patrick was the lead author for the SEO chapter of the 2021 Web Almanac and reviewer for the 2022 chapter. He helped define the role of Search Marketing Strategist for the US Department of Labor. He also co-wrote the SEO Book For Beginners by Ahrefs and was the Technical Review Editor for The Art of SEO 4th Edition.
He’s spoken at 100+ industry events including Pubcon, SMX, Tech SEO Boost, Ad World, Digital Summit, and many more. He’s written 100+ articles for industry sites like Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal, MarTech, and right here at Ahrefs. He was a finalist for SEO Speaker of the Year and SEO Contributor of the Year at the 2018 Search Engine Land Awards. He was also an EzineArticles Platinum author back in the day and still has the mug to prove it.
Patrick has judged nearly a dozen search awards for multiple years including the US Search Awards, UK Search Awards, and Interactive Marketing Awards. He participated in and documented the world’s largest SEO contest to date, the Wix SEO Hero contest which he arguably should have won.
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