Google’s AI answer box is becoming the front page of commercial search. Semrush tracked 400 US commercial keywords across banking, software and ecommerce from September 2025 to August 2026. AI Overviews now appear on 88% of those queries, up from 45.75%. Weighted by search volume, coverage reached 97.08%.
Queries containing “reviews” moved from 30.14% to 89.04%. Ecommerce terms jumped from 32.62% to 85.11%. The study measures appearance only—no clicks, US desktop, and small industry cells—so treat the exact numbers as directional. The trend is the point: almost every commercial search now carries an AI answer above the organic results.
AI referrals are still almost zero
Showing up inside an AI answer is not the same as earning a click. Marie Haynes’ 12-month GA4 analysis of 100 sites found ChatGPT sessions were just 0.62% of the volume driven by Google organic. Google still drove 96.5% of conversions. SEO Works found organic search delivered 39 times more traffic than AI assistants. Kevin Indig said he could not find a reliable relationship between AI visibility and branded search or direct traffic.
The samples are small, and an absence of evidence is not proof of no effect. Still, Semrush is blunt about the consequence: ranking number one “likely won’t lead to as much traffic as it did this time last year.”
The commercial search math has changed
For D2C and performance marketing teams, the ecommerce shift matters most. A year ago, roughly a third of ecommerce queries had an AI Overview; now 85.11% do. A top-10 blue link is no longer a guarantee of visibility, let alone a click.
That does not make SEO obsolete. It makes the value of ranking more conditional. The right question is no longer “did we rank?” but “did we get the click, and did it convert?” ChatGPT visitors may convert at a higher rate, but at 0.62% of organic volume the opportunity is small relative to the budget decisions being considered.
Rank tracking gets harder to trust
Ahrefs says Google is serving altered results to suspected scrapers, affecting 5% to 20% of results returned to SEO data tools. Ahrefs now filters abnormal results, requests replacements and cleans historical data. Other vendors report similar anomalies: DemandSphere, Nozzle and AccuRanker each saw wrong rank checks, with a daily peak of 27% at Nozzle.
Put the three findings together and the picture is uncomfortable. If AI Overviews answer nearly nine in ten commercial queries, and AI assistants send a fraction of organic traffic, ranking value falls. If the tools measuring that fall are being fed altered data, the decline is harder to spot and easier to mismanage.
What to do next
- Track AI Overview presence separately from organic rank and clicks.
- Validate sudden rank-tracker changes before changing strategy.
- Re-weight SEO value toward brand search, commercial pages and revenue.
The opportunity is not in pretending AI search does not matter. It is in measuring what still produces a click and a customer when the answer page keeps growing and the referral keeps shrinking.
Source: PPC Land
