Google's AI Overviews started as an experiment. They're now showing on roughly 15% of all searches in the US — and that number has been climbing every month since the feature left beta in mid-2024.
For most advertisers, this has happened silently. Your campaigns are still running. Your keywords are still active. Your budget is still spending. What's changed is what the user sees when your keyword triggers: an AI-generated answer block sitting above the fold, above the ads, answering the question before anyone scrolls to your ad.
Click-through rates don't announce when they start declining because of AI Overviews. They just decline.
what an AI Overview actually does to a SERP
A standard Google results page puts ads at the top, then organic results. That's the page structure most ad accounts were built around.
When an AI Overview is present, the layout changes. The AI-generated answer — pulled from across the web, summarized by Google — appears first. It can run several hundred words. It collapses when you're done reading it. Below the collapse is where the ads appear.
The user has already got what they came for. The intent is satisfied before they reach your ad. Some will still click through. Most don't need to.
The impact on CTR varies by query type. Informational queries ("how does X work," "what is Y") get hit hardest — the AI Overview answers them completely. But commercial queries are now affected too. "Best CRM for small business," "Google Ads management services," "email marketing platform" — these are all triggering AI Overviews in markets where the feature is active. These are also keywords with $15–$50 CPMs that advertisers are bidding on right now.
the keywords most at risk
AI Overviews are more likely to appear on:
- Queries that have a clear "answer" Google can synthesize — comparisons, how-tos, best-of lists
- Queries with high organic competition, where Google has lots of content to pull from
- Informational-intent searches that happen to sit next to commercial ones in a campaign
The problem is that those categories overlap heavily with the upper-funnel and mid-funnel keywords most Google Ads accounts rely on for volume. If your campaign structure mixes awareness keywords with conversion keywords in the same ad group, you may have no idea which keywords are getting their SERPs disrupted.
AI Overviews also vary by location. A keyword that shows an AI Overview in the US may not show one in the UK or UAE. If you run campaigns across multiple markets, each market needs its own check — the same keyword can be safe in one country and actively suppressed in another.
what you can do right now
The manual version: open an incognito window, search your top 20 keywords one by one, and note which ones show an AI Overview. It takes 20 minutes and gives you a clear picture of your exposure.
What to do with the results depends on the keyword:
If a keyword shows an AI Overview with no ads: consider whether it's worth bidding on at all. Google is effectively removing it from the commercial results page. You can keep running it, but adjust your expectations on CTR and CPA. It may be doing brand awareness work rather than conversion work, and your bidding strategy should reflect that.
If a keyword shows an AI Overview alongside ads: the CTR is lower than it was 18 months ago, but the keyword isn't dead. Monitor it separately from non-Overview keywords and watch for CTR decay over time. This is Medium Risk — active, but declining.
If a keyword shows no AI Overview: this is where your budget should be concentrating. Clean SERPs with ads at the top perform closer to pre-AI benchmarks. Low Risk doesn't mean ignore it — it means it's working as intended.
checking at scale
The manual approach works for 20 keywords. It doesn't work for accounts with hundreds of active keywords across multiple markets.
That's the gap I've been working on. The AI Overview Keyword Finder — currently in development and listed as Coming Soon on this site — is designed to check up to 20 keywords at once, across 7 countries, and return risk scores with the underlying SERP signals (ad count, featured snippet, organic count) that explain the score.
The technical challenge has been getting reliable data. Google detects and blocks automated requests from cloud servers — a problem that affects any tool doing this kind of check programmatically. The fix is routing requests through SerpAPI, which handles Google's bot detection and returns structured data with AI Overview detection built in. That integration is in progress.
When it's live, the tool will handle the keyword audit that currently takes 20 minutes of manual work in under 30 seconds, exportable to CSV.
Until then: the manual check is worth doing for your top keywords today. AI Overviews have been quietly reshaping which Google searches are actually worth bidding on, and most accounts haven't adjusted their keyword strategy to reflect that.
If you want a broader picture of where your Google Ads budget is going, the free audit at Gromerce shows you allocation and performance gaps across your account in a few minutes.
The SERP your account was built for in 2023 is not the SERP you're buying in 2026.
Related articles: Your Google Ads Are Showing in AI Mode Now — Here's What That Changes · Google Expands Smart Bidding Exploration to Shopping and PMax — And Changes How Your Budget Spends Itself · Google Ads CTR Is Up — So Why Are Your Conversions Flat? The Data Finally Has an Answer
Sources: Google Search status dashboard, Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal, WordStream AI Overview research, May 2026
