AI Overviews and the Evolution of Search: Organic Results Remain Key

The rise of AI-powered search, particularly Google’s AI Overviews (AIO), is reshaping how people uncover information online. Yet, despite significant growth, traditional organic search results continue to hold a majority share of search queries, demonstrating a blended search landscape rather than a complete takeover by AI.

AI Overview Growth: A Rapid Expansion

AI Overviews have experienced substantial growth over the past year, increasing by 58% between February 2025 and February 2026. Certain sectors have seen even more dramatic increases. The education sector, for example, witnessed a surge from 18% of queries triggering AI search results in May 2025 to 83% by December 2025. B2B technology queries similarly saw a significant expansion, growing from 36% to 82% during the same period. Restaurants experienced a notable jump, with AI search results appearing for 78% of queries compared to just 10% previously.

Healthcare remains a strong area for AI-driven results, with 88% of queries triggering an AI Overview as of December 2025, up from 72% in 2024. This aligns with data from OpenAI, which indicates that over 5% of all ChatGPT chats are health-related, and 25% of global weekly active users utilize the platform for health-related searches BrightEdge.

The industries experiencing the most expansion in AI Overview coverage include:

• Healthcare
• B2B Tech
• Education
• Insurance
• Entertainment
• Travel
• eCommerce
• Finance
• Restaurants

Organic Search Still Dominates

Despite the impressive growth of AI Overviews, classic search results still appear in 52% of all queries, nearly matching the prevalence of AI-driven results. While AI is gaining traction, particularly in high-value sectors like B2B, a slim majority of searches still rely on traditional rankings.

This ongoing relevance of organic search is consistent with the broader evolution of search over the past two decades, marked by the introduction of features like local search, Google Maps, and product search. The traditional ten blue links have become increasingly supplemented by various answer formats, a trend solidified by the introduction of Featured Snippets in 2014 BrightEdge.

AI Overviews: A Visual Shift in the Search Experience

AI Overviews significantly alter the structure of the search results page. These content blocks, often exceeding 1,200 pixels in height – larger than the average desktop viewport of 900 pixels – push traditional organic results below the fold, dominating the user’s initial view BrightEdge. This shift suggests users are becoming accustomed to conversational information discovery.

How AI Overviews Select Sources

AI Overviews do not simply mirror traditional page-one rankings. They synthesize information and cite sources that often differ from the top organic listings. This is driven, in part, by Google’s FastSearch, which retrieves top organic results for multiple queries to formulate an AI-generated answer.

Only about 17% of sources cited in AI Overviews also rank within the organic top 10. However, overlap increases when considering the top 100 results, indicating that AI Overviews draw from the broader organic ecosystem without being solely reliant on top-ranking pages BrightEdge.

Continued Growth and a Divided Search Landscape

BrightEdge’s research indicates that the expansion of AI Overviews is ongoing, with a 58% year-over-year increase. While broader citation overlap across the top 100 results has modestly increased, top 10 overlap remains relatively flat. This suggests a continued evolution of search, where AI and organic results coexist rather than one completely replacing the other.

The future will likely reveal which types of queries continue to trigger classic search results, potentially indicating a sustained role for local or navigational searches.