8.64% of AI Overviews Appear Outside Position #1 (And as Low as Position #6)

Portrait of Patrick Stox

By Patrick Stox

Technical SEO at Ahrefs

Reviewed by
July 18, 2025
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.

Portrait of Patrick Stox

Patrick Stox is a Product Advisor, Technical SEO, & Brand Ambassador at Ahrefs. He was the lead author for the SEO chapter of the 2021 Web Almanac and a reviewer for the 2022 SEO chapter. 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 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.

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