New research from BrightEdge shows that while AI Overviews (AIO) has expanded its coverage since launch, it surprisingly doesn’t represent a complete shift away from traditional organic search results, as just over half of queries continue to trigger classic search results.
AIO Grows 52% In One Year
A twelve-month comparison from February 2025 to February 2026 shows that AI Overviews (AIO) coverage grew by a whopping 58%. The education sector experienced the strongest expansion in the number of queries triggering AI search results, from 18% of queries in May 2025 to 83% of queries triggering AI search results by December 2025.
Similarly, B2B technology queries experienced a massive expansion of queries that triggered AI search results, growing from 36% to 82%. One of the strongest growing sectors for AI search results is restaurants, growing from 10% of queries to 78% of queries triggering AI search results.
Meanwhile, healthcare queries were already triggering AIO results by a large margin since 2024, at a rate of 72% of the time. By December 2025, however, the rate at which healthcare queries triggered AIO edged up to 88%, which is an extraordinary amount of AI search results. Given that AIO is said to be driven by user satisfaction metrics, this may mean that users are appreciating having an AI explain healthcare-related topics in a conversational format.
These results track with a report published by OpenAI in January 2026 that showed over 5% of all chats are healthcare-related and that 25% of weekly active users globally search ChatGPT with health-related questions.
It’s not just patients who are using AI for health related questions. According to a recent Brookings Institution survey, 53% of healthcare professionals use AI.
The nine industries experiencing the most expansion are:
- Healthcare
- B2B Tech
- Education
- Insurance
- Entertainment
- Travel
- eCommerce
- Finance
- Restaurants
Organic Search Holds A Slim Majority
Yet despite those high growth numbers, classic search results are still appearing at a rate of 52% of all queries, meaning that AI and classic search are almost at an even number. Yet clearly, many of the high-value queries in sectors such as B2B are moving away from classic search and showing up more frequently in AI search.
In a way, that’s maybe not so surprising because technology is in a constant state of change, and there’s always something new to be understood, something that is arguably more satisfactorily served in a conversational manner rather than ten blue links, like with healthcare.
Yet the growth results for restaurants, what explains that? Is it research-driven? If so, then that may indicate a content gap that reviewers or restaurants may need to fill.
Nevertheless, a little more than half of search queries still return a standard results page composed entirely of ten blue links. AI Overviews now trigger on nearly half of all tracked queries, but that growth has not eliminated the traditional SERP.
Search Is Multifactor
Search can be said to operate in two distinct modes depending on the query. Some results pages begin with an AI-generated summary. Many others present only ranked links. The takeaway is clear: AI Overviews are widespread, but search remains divided rather than fully transformed.
This splitting of search is part of a longer, more established trend of the past twenty years since Google introduced local search, Google Maps, and product search. Since the early 2000s, the classic ten blue links have been more nostalgia than reality, but it only hit home for the SEO community with the introduction of Featured Snippets in 2014, which made it clear that answers were a priority at Google and that the ten blue links were now definitively a thing of the past.
The fact that AI search and classic search are almost evenly divided among keywords used by Google’s users is part of that ongoing trend of a constant evolution to answers.
AI Overviews Reshapes The Search Experience
AI Overviews does not appear on every query. But when it does appear, it changes the structure of the results page in a measurable way that is hard not to notice because it is often in the form of a large content block placed above traditional listings.
The report finds that the average AI Overviews exceeds 1,200 pixels in height. A standard desktop viewport measures roughly 900 pixels. The first organic result sits completely below the fold. AI Overviews can dominate the layout visually, occupying more than the entire visible screen before a user scrolls.
AI Overviews does not appear on every query, but when it does, it occupies a large portion of the screen and pushes traditional search results further down the page. The takeaway is that users are becoming conditioned to conversational information discovery, and the paradigm of search is becoming more about answers and discovery.
AI Overviews Does Not Mirror Page One Rankings
A key measured difference appears in how AI Overviews selects sources. Traditional search results are ordered by ranking position. AI Overviews synthesize information and cite sources that often differ from the top organic listings.
This is due to the effect of Google’s FastSearch, a method of retrieving the top 3 organic search results for multiple queries in response to one conversational query and then using those FastSearch organic results to create an answer.
The report unveils this phenomenon, showing that only about 17 percent of sources cited in AI Overviews also rank in the organic top 10. The report explains,
“Ranking number one organically does not automatically get you cited in the AIO. And not ranking on page one does not mean you are excluded from AIO citations either. The two experiences are connected, but they are not the same thing.”
AI Overviews’ citations are anchored in indexed content, but they do not mirror page-one search results. This circles back to FastSearch and Query-Fanout, where one essentially long-tail conversational query will trigger multiple queries, with each query resulting in three organic search results.
Overlap, however, increases when looking across the top 100 results rather than just the top 10. That broader alignment has grown modestly over time. AI Overviews draws from the organic ecosystem, but they cite content that frequently differs from traditional organic search winners. What this means is that AIO visibility relates to organic performance without being interchangeable with page-one ranking.
This is something that needs to be investigated more closely in terms of what it means for content creation and ranking.
Growth Continues Alongside Ongoing Reliance On Organic
BrightEdge’s report shows continued expansion of AIO rather than stabilization. AI Overviews presence has risen 58 percent year over year and is now approaching half of all tracked queries.
Broader citation overlap across the top 100 results has increased modestly, while top 10 overlap has remained largely flat.
The findings do not describe a binary shift from organic search to AI search, but they do show growth. Traditional organic results represent a slim majority of queries. What I’d like to see in the future is what kinds of queries are still triggering classic search? Are they local or navigational queries?
While AI Overviews expands in frequency and visually dominates the user interface where deployed, classic search is now dramatically diminished.
Featured Image by Shutterstock/BOY ANTHONY
