AI Overviews Now Appear in 43% of Google Searches, New Similarweb Data Shows

Google's AI Overviews have nearly tripled their footprint in search results over the past year, showing up in 43% of queries as of the latest measurement period, up from just 15% a year earlier. The figures come from a new market intelligence report by Similarweb, which tracked how generative AI features are reshaping both search behavior and the traffic flowing to publisher websites.

The growth isn't confined to Overviews. Google's AI Mode, the more conversational search experience the company has been pushing, saw visits climb from 126 million in June 2025 to 279 million by May 2026, more than doubling in under a year.

Similarweb's data also points to a subtler shift in how people search. Average query length has been rising, suggesting users are typing fuller, more conversational questions instead of the short keyword strings that have defined search behavior for decades.

For publishers, the picture is mixed. ChatGPT's referral traffic improved markedly after an OpenAI update in May 2026: click-through rates to external webpages jumped from around 25% in March to roughly 60% by the end of May, a sign that OpenAI has been sending more users onward to source sites rather than keeping them inside the chat interface.

Citation practices, however, remain inconsistent. Just 6.8% of U.S. ChatGPT desktop queries included citations as of May 2026, even though the overall number of AI responses carrying citations has grown more than fivefold over the past year. The gap underscores how unevenly attribution has been implemented across different query types and platforms.

The number of AI responses including citations rose more than fivefold during the past year, even as citation rates for individual query types like ChatGPT desktop searches stayed in the single digits.

The tension between AI convenience and publisher compensation is already spilling into infrastructure. Cloudflare has rolled out tools that let publishers block AI crawlers outright unless AI companies agree to pay for content access through its marketplace, effectively forcing a negotiation over the raw material that trains and grounds these systems.

Taken together, the numbers describe a search market in transition rather than a settled outcome. Google is cementing AI-generated answers as a default experience for a growing share of queries, while chatbots are sending more traffic back to the open web, but attribution and compensation for that content remain unresolved. Publishers now face a landscape where visibility inside AI answers doesn't always translate into the clicks, or the credit, they used to get from traditional search results.