Insights From 55.8M AI Overviews Across 590M Searches—A Study by Ahrefs

One of the unique things about Ahrefs Brand Radar is that we also have web pages as a data source. With this, you can see which brands are mentioned the most online and which have the most visibility. This can help you explain why a competitor might show up more than you do for AIOs or other LLMs.

LLMs work as next word predictors with a bit of variability built in. If you’re mentioned more in the training data such as web pages, you’re going to be mentioned more in the outputs of LLMs.

Don’t wait for the next big study if you need to report what is happening with AIOs. You can run the data yourself with Ahrefs at any time with Brand Radar and Keywords Explorer.

If you have questions, message me on X or LinkedIn.

Filtering Keywords Explorer to SERPs with AIOs and filtering by Cost-Per-Click (CPC), or the cost of an ad click, shows a slight bias for lower CPC terms.

What’s more interesting is that 71.67% of the searches with AIOs had no CPC data. This indicates a majority of the AIO searches weren’t monetized at all. It’s no wonder no one has seen ads in AIOs yet. They aren’t showing for the majority of the terms that make Google money.

I filtered Keywords Explorer to SERPs with AIOs and filtered by Search Volume. This one shocked me. I was expecting AIOs to be over-represented in lower volume queries.

I see AIOs often when I’m searching long-tail queries, especially ones that I think are pretty unique queries. This wasn’t reflected in the data, however it may be biased as we don’t include many of the queries like I described in our search traffic index.

I filtered Keywords Explorer to SERPs with AIOs and filtered by Keyword Difficulty (KD). It looks like AIOs are most likely to show on lower KD terms, but that’s pretty normal in the dataset.

You can filter Keywords Explorer as described above to AIOs on the SERP + Branded or Non-Branded intents. At the time of writing I got the following percentages:

AIOs are less likely to show up for branded searches.

You can filter Keywords Explorer as described above to AIOs on the SERP and Local or Non-Local intents. At the time of writing, I got the following percentages:

AIOs are less likely to show up for local searches.

Filtering Keywords Explorer to SERPs with AIOs and filtering by word count tells an interesting story. AIOs have a greater representation when looking at longer search queries.

In Keywords Explorer, you can do a blank search and get all the data for a country. If you filter by “SERP features” to “On SERP” > “AI Overview”, then you can see the total number of AIOs in our data. 24.8M for the US at the time of writing.

You can further filter by different data points like Intent to see more information about the type of terms where AIOs are showing.

For example, for the above search I got 24.3M keywords for Informational intent out of 24.8M total for the US. That’s 97.70% of the total.

Remember that searches can have more than 1 intent. Here’s a breakdown with the current numbers:

AIOs had a staggered rollout. You can see country-level data by changing the country in the dropdown in Brand Radar.

AIOs show for ~24.9 million out of 156 million search terms in our US organic search traffic index, ~16% of the total searches.

You can easily calculate this number for each country with the mentions data above and divide that by the total number of the Big Data page. India 16.5%, Brazil 15.5%, UK 12.5%, etc.

You can use the domains tab in Brand Radar to see what domains are mentioned in AIOs over time. We’ll have a filter for this shortly, but right now you can see the domains that have the greatest share of AIOs.

AIOs are dominated by top sites. While many people report losing clicks to AIOs, I wouldn’t be surprised if many of these sites were actually benefiting from them.

For those 50 sites, here are the categories and their percentage of overall mentions:

You can filter the dataset to be more specific to your industry. Check the domain tabs to see how competing sites are performing. For example, here I’ve filtered to look for keywords or AI Overviews containing “website builder”.

Another way of doing this is to use the full dataset, but use the “Find mentions of brands, products, or services” filter. Enter 1 or 2 and use “Suggest more” to use AI to get some of the competing companies or products.

The share and reach reports will give you Share of Voice (SoV) for mentions and impressions.