For two years, most of the AI Overviews conversation has been about informational queries: the how-tos, the definitions, the "what is" searches that used to send traffic to blog posts and now get answered on the results page. That fight is real, but it's not where the money is. New research from Semrush says the bigger shift already happened somewhere else: commercial search, the queries people run right before they buy something.
What Changed With AI Overviews, In Two Numbers
Semrush examined more than 600,000 keywords across 10 industries between November 2025 and April 2026. The headline finding is a divergence, not just a trend line going up. Search results showing an AI Overview on commercial-intent queries grew 71% during that period. Purely transactional-intent search volume, meanwhile, declined 5% over the same six months.
Put those next to each other and the story is not "AI Overviews are everywhere now." It's more specific than that. AI Overviews used to concentrate on informational queries, the early-funnel questions where a summarized answer made obvious sense. This data says they've moved deep into the middle of the funnel, onto queries where someone is actively comparing options, checking prices, or narrowing down a purchase decision. That's a different kind of query, with a different kind of consequence when you lose visibility on it.
Most of the GEO advice published in the last two years was built around the first phase of this shift, not the second. Fix your how-to content. Structure your definitions. Get your glossary pages extractable. None of that is wrong, and none of it is finished work, but it was scoped for a moment when AI Overviews mostly touched the top of the funnel. Six months of data now says the center of gravity has moved. The queries with buying intent behind them are the ones picking up AI Overview coverage fastest, and that's a harder problem than fixing a blog post, because commercial pages carry pricing, comparisons, and claims that need to survive being summarized correctly.
Six-month change, November 2025 to April 2026 — Semrush, 600,000+ keywords across 10 industries
A 5% decline in raw transactional volume sounds minor next to a 71% jump in AI Overview presence. It isn't. Fewer people are typing the bottom-of-funnel query directly, and more of the queries that remain are getting an AI-generated summary before a single organic or paid result even loads. Volume is compressing at the same time visibility is getting harder to win. That's the actual squeeze, and it's happening on the queries tied most directly to revenue.
Ads and AI Overviews Are Sharing the Same Real Estate Now
The second finding in the Semrush data cuts against a comfortable assumption a lot of teams have been making: that AI Overviews mostly show up where ads don't, or that paid and AI-generated answers occupy separate lanes on the SERP. They don't, and the gap is closing fast. Pages showing both a Google Ads placement and an AI Overview on the same search results page appeared roughly 2x more often than they did a year earlier.
That co-occurrence matters more than either signal on its own. It means the queries worth paying for and the queries worth getting cited on are increasingly the same queries. You can't treat organic AI visibility and paid search as budget lines that never touch. On a growing share of commercial searches, they're now stacked on top of each other, competing for the same few inches of screen before a user scrolls past both. Our take on how to split spend across that overlap is in SEO vs GEO: where to spend your next dollar — this data is exactly the kind of shift that should move the split.
It also means a paid search team can no longer assume it owns the top of a high-CPC results page by default. If an AI Overview is sitting above or alongside the ad on a query you're already bidding $5 a click for, the AI Overview is doing some of the persuading before your landing page ever loads. Ad copy and landing page content both need to account for a summary that's already shaped the searcher's expectations. That's a coordination problem between paid media and content teams that most organizations still route through two separate budgets and two separate people who rarely compare notes.
Finance Is the Canary, and It's Loud
Industry breakdowns rarely move in lockstep, and this one didn't either. Finance led every industry Semrush studied, with a 231% increase in commercial queries triggering an AI Overview — the single largest jump in the dataset, by a wide margin. High-CPC categories generally showed greater AI Overview prevalence than lower-CPC ones, and two stood out specifically: Jobs & Education, where AI Overview prevalence topped 60% on relevant queries, and Finance, close behind.
That pattern isn't random. Finance and Jobs & Education are both categories where research cycles run long, the decision carries real stakes, and buyers compare multiple options before committing. Those are exactly the conditions that make a summarized, comparison-style AI answer useful to the person searching, and exactly the conditions that made these categories expensive to advertise in long before AI Overviews existed. The queries with the most commercial weight are the ones getting summarized first. That's not a coincidence worth explaining away. It's the signal.
For regulated, high-consideration categories, this isn't an abstract SEO trend. It's a direct hit on the exact moment a prospect is comparing lenders, rates, or providers. We've written before about how Google's AI Overview can misattribute claims back to your own page when it gets something wrong — in finance, where the query is already a purchase decision, that risk sits closer to your pipeline than it does in a lower-stakes category. See what that's looked like in practice in our mortgage lending case study.
Jobs & Education deserves the same attention finance is getting, even though it doesn't carry the same regulatory weight. A prevalence rate above 60% means the majority of relevant queries in that category now show an AI Overview before anything else. Tuition comparisons, salary research, certification questions, loan repayment terms — all of it sits in a category where the searcher is making a decision with a multi-year payoff, which is exactly the kind of query an AI engine is built to summarize into a tidy answer. If your content in that space is written to rank, not to be quoted accurately, you're exposed the same way a finance brand is.
The CPC Gap Tells You Where the Risk Sits
Semrush also pulled the CPC data apart by whether a keyword triggered an AI Overview at all. In both premium categories studied, the keywords that triggered an AI Overview carried meaningfully higher average CPCs than the ones that didn't. In Jobs & Education, AI-Overview-triggering keywords averaged $5.02 in CPC against $1.51 for non-triggering keywords. In Finance, it was $4.84 against $2.14.
| INDUSTRY | AI-OVERVIEW-TRIGGERING AVG. CPC | NON-TRIGGERING AVG. CPC |
|---|---|---|
| Jobs & Education | $5.02 | $1.51 |
| Finance | $4.84 | $2.14 |
That gap is the whole argument in one table. AI Overviews aren't distributing evenly across cheap and expensive keywords. They're concentrating on the expensive ones, the ones advertisers already pay the most for because they convert. If you rank the keywords in your account by CPC and overlay AI Overview prevalence, the two lists start to look like the same list. That's not a coincidence Semrush is reporting on informational content. It's a coincidence on the queries your paid team already knows are worth the most.
This is also a budget-defense argument, not just a visibility one. If you're the person justifying content or GEO spend to a CFO, "our blog needs better headings" is a hard sell. "Our $5.02-CPC keywords are increasingly getting summarized by an AI Overview before the click happens, and we don't know if it's citing us or a competitor" is a different conversation entirely, because it's denominated in the same currency the paid budget already runs on. Use the CPC data to make the case in terms finance and ops leaders already track.
What This Means for Where You Spend Next
Most GEO audits still start with blog content, because that's where the earliest AI Overview panic started and where most of the tooling and advice got built. This data says start somewhere else. Pull your highest-CPC, highest-commercial-intent keyword set — the pages your paid team already treats as expensive because they convert — and check AI Overview presence on that list first. That's where Semrush's six months of data says both the exposure and the payoff concentrated.
If you're in finance, insurance, legal, or another regulated, high-CPC category, treat this as a priority audit, not a background task. Get your reporting to show, side by side, where AI Overviews are appearing on your commercial keywords and what that's doing to click-through and pipeline — not just rankings. Our reporting and analytics work and our framework for attributing pipeline to organic and AI-cited traffic both exist because rankings alone won't tell you this story anymore. If your team serves fintech clients or operates in that category directly, this is the data that should be driving next quarter's GEO budget, not last year's informational-query playbook.
Do this next: run that three-step audit on your 50 highest-CPC keywords before you touch another blog brief. That list is your actual GEO priority queue for the next quarter, and it's the one this data says is moving fastest. The blog content can wait.
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Josh leads work at the intersection of SEO and generative engines at Something Inc., helping B2B brands get ranked and cited across every major AI engine.