A new analysis from Peec AI, an AI search visibility platform, found that Google’s AI Overviews appeared in about 87% of the 500,000 prompts it studied.
The sample skews toward commercial, buying-intent queries and leaves out navigational searches. So the figure describes a specific slice of search, not Google overall.
What Peec Found
For decision-stage prompts, the kind someone uses when comparing products, the rate was 88.5%. Longer prompts triggered AI Overviews more often. Two-word queries returned an AI Overview 64.6% of the time, while prompts of 11 to 15 words peaked near 89%.
Presence varied by region. Within the EU, AI Overviews appeared in 76% of sampled searches, compared with 90.3% outside it. France was the outlier at 0%, since Google hasn’t launched AI Overviews or AI Mode there.
Why The Number Runs So High
The 87% figure runs above what broad keyword studies report. Ahrefs analyzed 146 million results and found AI Overviews on 20.5% of keywords. A randomized field experiment we covered last month saw them on 42% of queries. Earlier samples from Authoritas and SE Ranking landed near 30%.
The gap appears to come down to what Peec measured. Its dataset consists of business-oriented prompts, mostly commercial research and product comparisons, and excludes navigational searches such as standalone brand names. In Peec’s sample, those high-intent, fuller-sentence prompts triggered AI Overviews more often. Strip out the navigational and short-tail queries that rarely return one, and the average climbs.
So the 87% measures how often AI Overviews appear for buying-intent prompts, not how often they appear across all of Google.
How The Test Worked
Peec drew the prompts from its own dataset, sampled in April. It used machine-learning models to sort prompts by funnel stage and query type, then measured how often AI Overviews showed up for each. Peec hasn’t published accuracy figures for those classifiers, so the labels are model-assigned rather than hand-checked.
Why This Matters
What matters for your visibility is where AI Overviews show up. In Peec’s sample, they appeared on most decision-stage prompts, like comparison and “best X for Y” searches that shoppers use when comparing options. In these cases, the AI Overview is often the first thing a buyer sees, so being featured here can influence which brands they think about.
If a visibility effort targets only informational searches, it misses the searches that lead to purchases.
Looking Ahead
AI Mode is the surface to watch next. It passed a billion monthly users in its first year, and Google is now linking it to AI Overviews so a follow-up question moves a user from the overview into AI Mode without leaving Search.
Featured Image: blocberry/Shutterstock
