Quick Answer
Increasingly, the commercial ones. Semrush refreshed its AI Overviews study in December 2025, after analysing more than 10 million keywords. According to that study, the informational share of AI Overview queries fell from 91.3% in January 2025 to 57.1% by October. Over a broadly similar period, per the same study, commercial intent rose from 8.15% to 18.57%. Transactional rose from 1.98% to 13.94%. Navigational rose from under 1% to 10.33%. Informational queries still hold the largest share. What changed is that service, product and brand queries are no longer exempt.
The Advice Most People Are Still Repeating Is Out Of Date
This matters more than the numbers themselves, so it is worth being direct about it.
The original version of this study was published in March 2025, and its finding was clear: AI Overviews appeared overwhelmingly on long-tail informational queries and left commercial terms alone. That finding travelled widely. It is still being quoted in agency blog posts and repeated by AI assistants today.
The study was refreshed in December 2025 with newer data, and the picture reversed. Per the refreshed version, lower-funnel intent types all grew substantially through 2025.
So if you built a content plan in mid-2025 on the reassurance that service pages were safe, that plan rested on a superseded snapshot. Worth checking before your next quarter. It is also a good argument for citing studies by revision date rather than by year.
What The Refreshed Data Shows
According to the December 2025 refresh of the Semrush AI Overviews study:
| Search intent | Earlier share | Later share | Direction |
|---|---|---|---|
| Informational | 91.3% (Jan 2025) | 57.1% (Oct 2025) | Falling sharply |
| Commercial | 8.15% | 18.57% | More than doubled |
| Transactional | 1.98% | 13.94% | Roughly seven times |
| Navigational | 0.84% | 10.33% | Roughly twelve times |
One note on that last row. The study's summary section gives the navigational baseline as 0.74% while its body gives 0.84%. The table above uses the body figure. Either way the direction is the same.
The navigational row is the one to sit with. Navigational queries are people searching for a specific brand or site. For most businesses that is their warmest traffic. Semrush's own reading is that even branded traffic is now at risk.
Two things stop this from being a reason to panic.
First, coverage is volatile rather than steadily climbing. Per the same study, AI Overviews appeared on 6.49% of queries in January 2025, rose to 24.61% in July, then fell back to 15.69% in November. A metric that nearly quadruples and then drops by a third is not a trend line you should extrapolate.
Second, the click data does not behave the way the intent data suggests it should.
The Zero-Click Finding Cuts Against The Panic
Here is the result most coverage of this study leaves out, and it is the most useful one for a founder deciding what to do.
Semrush partnered with Datos to track a specific set of keywords. These did not trigger an AI Overview in May 2025 but did by October. That design isolates the effect on the same terms rather than comparing different ones. According to that analysis, the zero-click rate on those keywords fell from 33.75% to 31.53%.
It fell. On the same keywords, after the summary arrived.
The study's own conclusion is that AI Overviews do not automatically increase zero-click behaviour. Keywords carrying them do show higher zero-click rates. Per the study, that reflects the type of query rather than the summary sitting on top of it.
That is a meaningful correction to the dominant narrative. Keywords with AI Overviews do lose more clicks than average. But on this evidence, the summary arriving on a query you already ranked for is not what causes the loss.
Most commentary has this backwards. The intent expansion is the real story in this data. The click apocalypse is not.
Your Industry Probably Matters More Than The Average
Per the December 2025 study, saturation varies enormously by vertical. Science led at 25.96% of keywords carrying an AI Overview, followed by Computers and Electronics at 17.92% and People and Society at 17.29%.
At the other end, per the same study, Real Estate, Shopping and Arts and Entertainment each sat below 3%.
The explanation Semrush offers for the laggards is about intent rather than topic. Those categories lean toward local and transactional intent. Per the study, Google already satisfies that demand with local packs and ads. A text summary cannot supply the maps, reviews and action buttons a buyer needs.
For an Indian or UAE business in property, retail or hospitality, that is a different exposure profile from the average. Do not accept a general figure when your vertical sits at either extreme.
Audit Your Own Exposure
This takes about half an hour and replaces every published average with your own numbers.
Export your top 50 pages by clicks from Search Console over the last six months. Label the dominant intent of the query bringing traffic to each. Use four labels: informational, commercial, transactional or navigational. Then search a sample of those queries in a logged-out browser. Record whether an AI Overview appears and whether you are cited.
| What the audit shows | Reading | Sensible response |
|---|---|---|
| Overviews on your brand queries | Highest priority | Check what the summary says about you |
| Overviews on service or product queries | New exposure | Strengthen the page, track clicks monthly |
| Overviews on blog queries only | Long-standing exposure | Optimise for citation, adjust forecasts |
| No Overviews on your queries | Not affected yet | Recheck quarterly, change nothing |
The decision rule has two conditions. Act where an AI Overview appears on a query that makes you money, and where clicks on that page have actually fallen. An Overview appearing without a measurable click decline is not a reason to rewrite a page.
Check the brand row first. If a summary appears when someone searches your company name, read what it says. An inaccurate summary of your business on your own brand query outranks any ranking issue in importance. It is also fixable, through the accuracy and clarity of your own pages.
The tradeoff worth naming. Moving your content mix toward commercial terms no longer buys the protection it would have done in early 2025. Those terms also remain harder and more expensive to rank for. The more defensible response is to make your commercial pages clearer and more accurate, rather than to produce more of them.
Your five-minute action today: search your own brand name in a logged-out browser. Read what the AI Overview says about your business, if one appears.
Tips For Working With This Data
- Cite this study by its December 2025 refresh date, not as a 2025 study. The March and December versions say different things.
- Check your brand queries before your blog queries. Navigational exposure grew fastest and matters most.
- Track AI Overview presence on a handful of key queries monthly. Coverage moved up and down sharply through 2025.
- Compare impressions against clicks in Search Console rather than watching clicks alone. Stable impressions with falling clicks is the pattern to catch.
- Check your own vertical rather than the average. Per the study, saturation ranged from under 3% to nearly 26% across industries.
- Do not treat a single month of AI Overview coverage as a trend. This dataset quadrupled and then fell back within one year.
What To Keep An Eye On
Watch whether AI Overviews appear on your brand and service queries. That is where the growth has been. Watch what any brand-query summary says about your business, and whether it is accurate. Watch the intent split in the next refresh of this study rather than assuming the direction continues. And watch the advertising question. Per this study, Google Ads now appear at the bottom of a quarter of AI Overview results pages, against under 1% in March 2025.
FAQs
Are my service pages still safe from AI Overviews?
Less safe than they were. According to the December 2025 refresh, transactional intent grew from 1.98% to 13.94% of AI Overview triggers across the measured period. That is still a minority of queries. It is no longer the near-zero exposure reported earlier in 2025.
Do AI Overviews reduce my clicks?
Not as reliably as commonly claimed. According to the same study, Semrush and Datos compared the same keywords before and after an AI Overview appeared. The zero-click rate fell from 33.75% to 31.53%. Keywords with Overviews do carry higher zero-click rates overall, which appears to reflect the type of query rather than the summary itself.
Should I stop writing informational content?
No. Informational queries still carry the largest share of AI Overviews. Informational content still builds topical coverage and supports commercial pages. Adjust what you forecast from it rather than abandoning it.
Who produced this data?
Semrush, which sells SEO and AI visibility software. It used its own keyword database and clickstream data from Datos, a Semrush company. That is a closed loop worth knowing about. Verify the pattern against your own Search Console data before acting on it.
Where This Leaves You
The reassuring version of this story expired, and most of the internet has not updated. Lower-funnel queries now draw AI Overviews at many times their early-2025 rate, branded search included. At the same time, the click effect on any individual keyword looks milder than the commentary suggests. Coverage is also volatile enough that a single month proves little.
That combination argues for one specific action rather than a strategy change. Find out what a summary says about you on your own brand name.
If you would rather have that audit run across your whole library, that is part of our AI search optimization and content marketing work. Our guide to SEO, AEO and GEO explains the wider picture. Why SEO content fails covers the quality question underneath it, and our AI visibility audit covers the measurement setup. For a worked example of a content library rebuilt around commercial intent, see our health drink content SEO case study.