AI Overviews Now Appear on 88% of Commercial Keywords. Here's What That Means for Ecommerce Brands

For a long time, Google's AI Overviews were treated as an informational-search problem. They answered the “how” and “why” questions, while the searches that actually drive revenue, the comparisons, the reviews, the “best” lists, were left largely alone.

That's no longer the case. New research from Semrush, published on 21 October 2026, shows AI Overviews have nearly doubled their presence on commercial searches in a year. In ecommerce, they've moved from roughly a third of tracked keywords to 85%.

These are the searches where people decide what to buy. And Google is increasingly summarising the options before anyone reaches your website.

 

What the research found

Semrush tracked a fixed panel of 400 commercial keywords across banking, ecommerce and software every month from September 2025 to August 2026, using US desktop data. The keywords were grouped into five types of commercial search: “best X for Y”, reviews, brand vs brand, brand alternatives and price or cost.

• 88% of the tracked keywords showed an AI Overview in August 2026, up from 45.75% in September 2025.
• 97% when weighted by search volume, meaning the most-searched terms are the most likely to trigger one.
• Ecommerce rose from 32.6% to 85.1%, the biggest jump of the three industries.
• “Best X for Y” searches reached 96%, the highest coverage of any search type.
• Review searches climbed from 30% to nearly 90%, the largest increase of all.
• Brand vs brand searches passed 86% and brand alternatives passed 82%.
• For ecommerce price and cost searches, coverage went from under 5% to over 71%.

It's worth being clear about what the study doesn't tell us. It's a US desktop sample of 400 keywords, not all of Google, and not UK search specifically. It also didn't measure clicks or sales, so it shows how often AI Overviews appear, not how much traffic they take. But the direction of travel is hard to ignore.

 

Why this matters for ecommerce brands

Think about the searches in this study: “best mattress for back pain”, “brand A vs brand B”, “brand A alternatives”, “brand A reviews”. Someone typing these has usually decided to buy. They're choosing who from.

Until recently, the job of SEO in these moments was to rank a category page, buying guide or comparison article as high as possible. That still matters. But when an AI Overview sits at the top of the page and summarises the options, it's now possible to rank on page one and still be missing from the answer the customer reads first.

That's why ranking and visibility are no longer the same thing. Being ranked and being recommended are becoming two different measures of success, and most reporting only tracks the first.

 

Your website is only one of the sources

AI Overviews don't just summarise the page that ranks first. Semrush notes they can draw on YouTube, Reddit threads, review sites, and both your own site and your competitors'. In one example from the study, a brand-comparison search cited the brand's own guide alongside a third-party software site, a YouTube video and another independent page.

In other words, what Google says about your products is shaped by everything the web says about them. Your product pages matter, but so do your reviews, the press coverage you've earned and the independent content that mentions you.

 

What we'd do now

1. Audit your most valuable commercial searches. Pick the 20 comparison, “best” and review searches that matter most to your revenue. For each, record whether an AI Overview appears, which brands it recommends, which sources it cites, and whether your products are described accurately.

2. Report on AI visibility, not just rankings. Add AI Overview presence and citations to your SEO reporting so you can see where you rank but aren't recommended, and where competitors are.

3. Make your products easy for AI to understand. Clean structured data, complete product feeds and clear, specific product information (materials, sizing, compatibility, who it's for) give Google something concrete to work with. Our generative engine optimisation work starts here.

4. Build the evidence around your brand. Genuine reviews, independent product testing, original research and coverage in trusted publications all feed the sources AI draws on. That's where Digital PR now earns its keep, well beyond links.

5. Check your own data before reacting. The study didn't measure traffic, so look at Search Console for your key commercial pages. If impressions are holding but clicks are falling, AI Overviews are a likely suspect.

 

The bottom line

SEO isn't disappearing. But what winning looks like on commercial searches is changing. The brands that come out ahead will be the ones that are found, understood and trusted wherever the decision is made, whether that's a traditional search result, an AI Overview or an AI assistant.

That's exactly why we bring SEO, Paid Media and Digital PR together as Connected Search, rather than treating them as separate channels with separate goals.

Source: Semrush, “AI Overviews have nearly doubled across five commercial search modifiers”, 21 October 2026. Figures are based on a fixed panel of 400 US desktop keywords.