Are AI Overviews Killing Your PPC Performance? What The Data Tells Us
Find out how AIOs are disrupting PPC performance, and what actions you can take today to protect your campaigns.
The Real Impact of AI Overviews on PPC Performance: A Data-Driven Breakdown
Are you worried about AI Overviews, or do you actually have the data to act on them?
Ask most PPC marketers how they feel about Google's AI Overviews (AIOs) and you'll hear the same thing: concern. Ask them if they have enough data and insight into how AIOs are actually behaving on their SERPs, and the confidence drops. Ask if they feel equipped to optimize their paid search strategy in this new landscape, and it drops further still.
That gap - between worry and actual insight - is the problem. Most of the AIO conversation right now is speculation. So instead of guessing, we went to the data. Our AIO research is based on more than 21 million search results over an 8-week period. Here's what it tells us about how AIOs are actually reshaping PPC performance, and what you can do about it.
The threat and the opportunity, in one screenshot
Before the numbers, a real example makes the stakes clear. Take a search for "best life insurance over 70." Sponsored ads sit at the top of the page as usual, and directly below them sits an AI Overview citing named providers.
Line them up and the mismatch is stark:
- SunLife appears first in the AIO, but isn't linked or cited
- Aviva is prominent in the AIO, but doesn't appear in any of the top ads
- Compare the Quote and Insurance Expert are running ads, but don't appear in the AIO at all
- British Seniors is the only brand with visibility in both the ad block and the AIO
Four brands, four completely different outcomes on the same SERP. That's the AIO threat and opportunity in a single screenshot: your ad spend and your AI visibility are no longer guaranteed to overlap, and if you're not tracking both, you have no way of knowing where you stand.
What does the data actually say?
AIO Frequency Rate (the % of searches where an AIO appears) and AIO Ad Penetration (the % of AIOs that contain an ad) look meaningfully different market to market:
- UK: 20% AIO Frequency Rate, 0% AIO Ad Penetration (ads in AIOs not live yet)
- US: 14% AIO Frequency Rate, 0.17% AIO Ad Penetration
In other words, AIOs show up more often in the UK, but ads almost never appear inside them in either market. AIOs are, overwhelmingly, ad-free real estate - which is exactly why they're disruptive to paid search rather than complementary to it.
AIOs are pushing ads down the page more than you'd think
Across industries, AIOs appear above the ad block roughly 20-25% of the time - on average, 1 out of every 4 searches sees ads pushed down the page by an AI Overview. That average hides a lot of variation:
| Industry | AIO below ads | AIO above ads |
|---|---|---|
| Healthcare | 35.4% | 64.6% |
| Gaming | 50.0% | 50.0% |
| Automotive | 62.3% | 37.7% |
| Financial Services | 76.3% | 23.7% |
| Energy | 76.9% | 23.1% |
| Retail | 75.2% | 24.8% |
| Travel | 80.5% | 19.5% |
Healthcare marketers, take note: nearly two-thirds of the time, your ads are being pushed below an AI Overview.
Longer search terms mean more AIOs
There's a clear pattern between query length and AIO presence: the longer the search term, the higher the chance an AIO shows up. This held true across Automotive, Financial Services, Healthcare, Retail, and Travel - with Financial Services showing the steepest climb, going from roughly 11.5% AIO frequency on 1-word queries to nearly 78% on 9-word queries. If your account leans on long-tail, question-style keywords, you should expect to be sharing more real estate with AI Overviews, not less.
Which industries see the most AIOs right now
Looking at UK data from April 2026, AIO frequency varies widely by category:
| Industry | AIO Frequency |
|---|---|
| Travel , Transportation | 14% |
| Retail , Electronics & Appliances | 16% |
| Automotive , Online Car Retailers | 18% |
| Retail , Health & Beauty | 18% |
| Finance , Insurance | 23% |
| Finance , Credit Cards | 23% |
| Finance , Loans & Mortgages | 27% |
| Travel , Destinations | 32% |
The pattern is consistent with what you'd expect: high-consideration, information-dense categories (finance, travel destinations) attract more AIOs than straightforward transactional searches.
Why this actually matters for revenue
Here's the chain reaction: AIO presence lowers CTR, lower CTR means fewer clicks, and fewer clicks ultimately means less conversions and revenue on PPC - and that hit extends cross-channel too, if you don't have organic visibility inside the AIO to compensate.
This isn't theoretical. In one mobile CTR trend we tracked, estimated CTR with an AIO present sat at 20.00%, compared to 26.70% without one - a meaningful gap in the same time period, on the same device. Multiply that gap across your highest-volume, highest-intent keywords, and it's easy to see how AIOs can quietly erode performance even while your campaigns look "normal" on the surface.
6 things you can do today
None of this means paid search is broken - it means the SERP has a new layer, and the marketers who win will be the ones actively managing it. Here's where to start:
- Monitor CTR & CPC. Keep close tabs on performance shifts so you can attribute changes to AIOs rather than guessing.
- Build a holistic search strategy. Decide deliberately: do you want to dominate AIOs, ads, and traditional organic listings all at once - or divide and conquer across the SERP?
- Opt in to AI campaigns. If you want ad visibility inside AIOs, test PMax and AI Max, which are more likely to surface there.
- Segment by device. AIO impact isn't uniform - test device-level optimizations, since SERP space (and AIO placement) varies by device.
- Refine your ad copy. Use it to counter AIO narratives directly, or as a chance to differentiate further from the generic summary above you.
- Monitor AIO frequency. You can't manage what you don't measure - track how often AIOs appear for your specific keyword set, not just the market average.
The bottom line
AI Overviews aren't a hypothetical future problem - they're already reshaping click-through rates, cost-per-click, and ad visibility across every major industry, right now. The marketers who move from "worried" to "informed" will be the ones actively monitoring AIO frequency, ad penetration, and CTR shifts at the keyword level, and adjusting strategy accordingly.
