Google AI Overviews for Ecommerce: What the Commercial-Query Data Actually Shows

The headline number depends on what you measure

Ask how often Google AI Overviews appear and you get answers from about 20% to nearly 90%, all from credible studies published within months of each other. That spread is not measurement error. It is the most important thing an ecommerce team needs to understand about AI Overviews: the appearance rate is a function of query intent, and commercial queries sit at the extremes.

A recent analysis of 500,000 prompts by Peec AI, covered by Search Engine Journal, put AI Overview presence at about 87%. Ahrefs, sampling 146 million keywords, found just 20.5%. Both are right. They measure different universes of search.

Intent is the dial Google is turning

When BrightEdge compared November 2024 with November 2025 using its Generative Parser, the pattern was clear. Google decides whether to show an AI Overview based on what the searcher is trying to do, not on category or search volume:

• Informational ("best air fryer"): ~83% AI Overview presence
• Pure product name ("air fryer"): ~14% presence
• Transactional ("buy air fryer online"): ~13% presence

Across the full shopping set the restraint is just as clear. Of roughly 20.9 million shopping keywords BrightEdge tracked, only about 14% (2.9 million) carried an AI Overview. Ecommerce is consistently the lowest of all verticals for AIO coverage. Other industries average close to 58%, while ecommerce sits around 16 to 18%. It is also the only major industry where coverage has net declined, from 27.2% in May 2024 to 8.8% by September 2024, recovering only to about 18.5% a year later.

The mix is shifting toward commercial, slowly

The Semrush AI Overviews study (10M+ keywords, January to November 2025) shows the intent composition of AIO keywords moving toward the money end of the funnel. The informational share fell while every commercial bucket grew:

• Informational: 91.3% to 57.1%
• Commercial: 8.15% to 18.57%
• Transactional: 1.98% to 13.94%
• Navigational: 0.84% to 10.33%

Overall AIO prevalence over the same window rose then pulled back: 6.49% of queries in January, a peak of 24.61% in July, then 15.69% by November. BrightEdge's September 2025 data caught one of those bursts, a 43.6% jump in 23 days (14.4% to 20.7% of ecommerce queries). Most of the new coverage, 79%, was on product-specific searches, concentrated in Home (32%), Apparel (28%) and Small Kitchen Appliances (13%). Review keywords saw zero new coverage, and 94% of best-of queries still had none.

The holiday pullback: a live look at Google's strategy

The clearest evidence that this is deliberate came over the 2025 holidays. According to BrightEdge's holiday shopping test, Google pulled AIO coverage back from a 26% peak (18 September) to a 9% baseline by 1 October, a 57% pullback and a 56.8% reduction year over year. Only 18% of the AIO keywords overlapped with the prior year, an 82% reshuffle of which searches even get an Overview.

Where Google kept AIOs, and where it stripped them out, maps neatly onto research-heavy versus purchase-heavy categories:

Where the clicks and citations go

When an AI Overview does appear, it consolidates the SERP. Semrush found that featured snippets, image carousels and organic reviews all show up less often once an AIO is present. For ecommerce specifically, BrightEdge reports that YouTube is now the most-cited non-brand source inside ecommerce AI Overviews, appearing in about 6.9% of them, nearly three times any other domain. Product video and credible review content are no longer optional for AIO visibility.

Meanwhile, Google is building a separate AI shopping stack

AI Overviews are only half the story. At I/O 2025 and through the 2025 holidays, Google rebuilt shopping around AI Mode and the Shopping Graph, now more than 50 billion product listings, with over 2 billion refreshed every hour. Google's announcements detail the new capabilities:

• Conversational AI Mode shopping with visual, guided discovery
• Virtual try-on, upload a photo to try on billions of apparel listings
• Price tracking and alerts
• Agentic buy-for-me checkout via Google Pay, rolling out with Wayfair, Chewy, Quince and select Shopify merchants

This is where transactional intent is heading: not into AI Overviews on the classic results page, but into a conversational surface with its own product feed and checkout.

What ecommerce teams should actually do

1. Win the research layer. Comparative, well-structured content (best-of lists, buying guides, head-to-head comparisons) is exactly where AIOs concentrate and where you can earn citations.
2. Keep transactional pages SERP-strong. AIOs rarely touch buy and product queries, so classic rankings, shopping feeds and reviews still close the sale.
3. Feed the Shopping Graph. Complete, accurate Merchant Center and structured product data (price, availability, variants, reviews) is the entry ticket to AI Mode, try-on and agentic checkout.
4. Invest in video and UGC. YouTube's citation dominance means product video and review content earn real estate inside AIOs.
5. Track by intent, not in aggregate. A single AIO coverage percentage hides everything that matters. Segment keywords by intent and category, and re-measure often, since 82% of AIO keywords reshuffled in a single year.

The bottom line

For ecommerce, AI Overviews are not yet an across-the-board threat to transactional traffic. Google is using intent as a dial: heavy AIO presence on research and comparison, deliberate restraint on buy queries, and a parallel AI Mode shopping experience for the actual purchase. The brands that win will stop chasing one number, treat the funnel as split across surfaces, and optimise for each.

Sources & further reading

• Search Engine Journal, AI Overview data looks different for commercial queries
• Peec AI, 500,000 prompts on AI Overviews
• BrightEdge, AI Overview intent hierarchy
• BrightEdge, 43.6% AIO growth in ecommerce searches
• BrightEdge, holiday shopping pullback
• Search Engine Land, AI Overviews guide research, Search wins the sale
• Semrush, AI Overviews study
• Google, agentic checkout and AI shopping tools