AI Overviews Now Show on Up to Half of Searches. What About Service Pages?

AI Overviews now appear on somewhere between 4 in 10 and half of Google searches, depending on who is measuring. For a local service business, the real question is what that does to the clicks your service pages used to get, and what you should change.

How often do AI Overviews show up now?

Two trackers put the number in the same neighborhood. Similarweb’s 2026 Generative AI Landscape report puts AI Overviews on 43% of Google searches, up from about 15% a year earlier. Search Engine Roundtable reported that the Semrush Sensor reads about 48% of the results pages it tracks.

The two companies measure different things in different ways, so neither number is “the” number. The fair summary is roughly 4 in 10 to half of searches. Either way, an AI summary at the top of the page is now normal, not an experiment.

Do AI Overviews reduce website traffic?

The best evidence so far says yes, for organic results. A randomized experiment posted on SSRN by Agarwal (Indian School of Business) and Sen (Carnegie Mellon) followed 1,065 users across 68,089 searches. When an AI Overview appeared, organic clicks fell 39.8% and zero-click searches rose 34.5%. Sponsored clicks stayed flat.

That last point is worth noticing. In this study, the summary took clicks from the organic listings, not from the ads. AI Overviews appeared on about 41% of the queries in the experiment, which lines up with the trackers above.

The wider click picture points the same way. SparkToro, using Similarweb clickstream data, found that 68.01% of US Google searches ended without a click from January to April 2026, up from 60.45% in 2024.

You may also see an Ahrefs figure quoted widely: a February study of 300,000 keywords that headlined a 58% drop in the top result’s click-through rate when an AI Overview was present. The raw rates cited in coverage of the study (0.073 to 0.016) would imply a steeper fall than 58%, so we treat that headline as directional rather than precise.

What is Google saying about clicks?

Google’s message is that AI features still send plenty of traffic. On the Alphabet Q2 2026 earnings call, Sundar Pichai said AI Mode has passed 1 billion monthly active users and that Google is:

“sending billions of clicks to websites each week”

Sundar Pichai, Alphabet

Both things can be true. Total clicks can be large while the click rate on any one search drops. For an individual plumber or roofer, what matters is the share of your own searches that still turn into visits and calls.

AI Mode itself is growing. In the same report, Similarweb counted 279 million AI Mode visits in May 2026, against 126 million in June 2025. Even so, SparkToro’s data found only 0.34% of searches moved into AI Mode from January to April, so the classic results page, often with an AI Overview on top, is still where most searches stay.

That may not last. At Google I/O in May, Google said folding AI Overviews into AI Mode was already underway and showed generative UI responses for both, according to Ovative’s recap. Plan for the AI layer to get bigger, not smaller.

What do AI Overviews mean for your service pages?

Think about why someone visits a page. If a page exists mainly to answer a quick question, such as what a fair price is for a water heater flush, an AI summary can often answer it without a click. That is the kind of content that loses visits first.

A service page has a different job. The person reading it is deciding who to hire, and that decision depends on trust, location and availability. An AI summary can name you, but the customer still needs a reason to pick up the phone. Your service pages should make that easy, and should give AI systems clear, specific facts to repeat.

Make each service page easy to quote and easy to act on

• Open with a two or three sentence answer: what you do, where, and how fast you can get there.
• List the cities and neighborhoods you actually serve, in plain text.
• State licensing, insurance, warranties and years in business as plain facts.
• Give honest price ranges or explain what drives the price, if you are comfortable doing so.
• Answer the questions customers really ask on the phone, in their words.
• Put a phone number and a short form above the fold on mobile.

This is the core of answer engine optimization: clear answers that AI systems can lift, on pages that still convert the people who click through. If your service pages are thin or copied from a template, our content strategy service rebuilds them around real customer questions.

Do not overcorrect

It is tempting to strip out every informational page because AI summaries answer those questions now. Hold off. Helpful supporting content can still build the topical depth that tells search engines, and the AI systems built on them, what you are an expert in. It also gives you material to link into your service pages.

The better move is to rebalance. Spend more of your effort on pages tied to a hiring decision, such as each core service and each city you serve, and keep supporting articles short, accurate and linked to the service they relate to. Then let your lead data, not traffic charts alone, decide what stays.

How do you measure the impact on your own site?

Do not rely on industry averages. Look at your own Search Console data for the pages that bring in leads, and compare impressions with clicks over time. If impressions hold steady while clicks fall on question-style queries, an AI summary is a likely cause.

Better reporting is on the way. In June, Google announced Search Console reports that show impressions from AI Overviews, AI Mode and Discover’s generative AI features, along with a property-level control to opt out of those features. Testing started with UK sites. Until those reports reach your property, the standard performance report and your call and form tracking are what you have.

The number that matters most is leads, not sessions. If organic clicks dip but calls and form fills hold, the visitors you lost were probably not buyers. If leads drop too, that is the signal to act. Our GA4 and call tracking setup ties those numbers together. If you also run paid leads, see our checklist on Local Services Ads moving to Google Ads.

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