Has Google reached "Peak AI Overview"? In this episode of Whiteboard Friday, Tom analyzes late 2025 data, revealing a drop in AIO frequency for informational queries and a new trend of AI results appearing below position one.

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Happy Friday, Moz fans. Today I want to talk to you about AI Overviews, which is probably not a new topic, or I hope it's not a new topic to you by now. But specifically, I want to talk about this slightly hyperbolic question. Did we pass peak AI Overview? 

And what I mean by that is, have we in some ways got to the point where AI Overviews are trending figuratively and literally downwards? So what do I mean by that?

So what I'm really talking about is some data that we've started to see over the course of 2025, particularly in the second half of 2025, where it's getting more and more common to see SERPs like this one. 

So this is just an example. As you can see, it doesn't even have real words on it. But basically, you can see these situations where you might have an organic result and then an organic result and then an AI Overview. Or sometimes it will be an image pack. Or sometimes it will be a featured snippet. Or sometimes it will be discussions and forums. 

But in any case, you have an AI Overview that isn't in position one. And this never used to happen or pretty much never used to happen historically. So it's interesting that this is a trend that we've started to see.

So here's how the data looks at the time of writing. We're filming this in October of 2025. Here's how the data looks. 

So at the moment, so this is for U.S. and UK, about 40,000 keywords tracked in STAT, a reasonably representative set of keywords, and we've got 15% on desktop or 13% on smartphone of AI Overviews appearing in position two or lower. 

So basically, there's something, and I'm not counting ads here, there is something that is above the AI Overview. And this is quite a lot. This is, on average, around one in seven cases.

And then, in about 1 in 20 cases, or maybe a little bit more than that, it's even further down, so in position four or lower. We've seen it's not that uncommon to get AIOs around position six, and that will often be with multiple different result types above them. 

The other data point that sort of goes with this is about intent. 

So overall, as I mentioned, it's about one in seven. About 14% of AIOs were in position two or lower. But actually, this is much higher for navigational.  

About a quarter, I think, of the keywords in that set were navigational keywords, not necessarily but typically meaning branded. And in those cases, it was about 26%. 

So what I take from that is that what's happening here is Google is saying, okay, we're really certain of what this user is trying to do. They're trying to go to this specific URL. They just want the link to this specific URL. So we'll just give them that rather than putting an AIO above it. 

So some of the examples we saw, for example, were keywords like "Amtrak routes," like "Starbucks menu." I think one of them was "Adobe PDF Converter." And you can think of all these examples, there's a clear branded site that was what the user was trying to reach. So Google has chosen to give them one or more results from that site and then the AI Overview. 

But it wasn't like these were all navigational. We had examples of this from every different type of search intent as well. And I'll post some data below if you want to dig more into that. 

But yeah, I think what we're seeing here is that this is about Google's confidence in the intent of the search, and navigational, that would typically be quite a high confidence.

The other trend that we're seeing at the same time is just about how common AI Overviews are overall. 

So in January, before the so-called great decoupling, in January, we saw AI Overviews on about 9% of searches in this keyword set or about 23% for informational. So these red numbers are for informational. And informational has been where AI Overviews have been most common for all of their history basically. So 9% or 23% in January. 

This went up massively in July, and this is when a lot of people really started to feel the squeeze. A lot of people saw their clicks going down in Google Search Console. And it's been sort of a controversy, I guess, about it with Google trying to defend these numbers. And a lot of this was driven by informational. 

Now, in October, at the time of recording, these numbers have both crept down a bit. And what's notable is that the informational numbers have crept down especially from 43% to 37%.

Obviously, that's still a lot of informational searches with an AI Overview at the top. But what's happened here is that some of the other intents where AI Overviews are less common, they're either steady or becoming slightly more common over time. But in informational, where it was most common, they're trending down a bit more steeply.

Now I don't know whether this will be a sustained trend, right? Google probably doesn't know either. They're still figuring this stuff out. But it's interesting to see that we're not just trending up and up and up and up, which I think is what a lot of us feared. 

We should talk briefly about the elephants in the room. Obviously, a lot of people are looking at Google's AI Mode and wondering if that's the future. And that basically looks like the whole SERP being one big AI Overview, right? So a lot of people will be looking at that.

My personal view is that AI Mode is a ChatGPT competitor. I think it's actually a ChatGPT killer.

It's for a slightly different use case in terms of what it presents. It's not necessarily for someone that is looking for web search. And maybe at the moment we use web search for more things than web search is really for.

But I think there is a balance here. I don't think you'll see the current AI Mode interface become the only interface, but maybe some hybridization is possible.

Speaking of which, if you look in Search Labs at the moment, and I recommend you do, if you look in Search Labs at the moment, you'll notice two things.

One is that this trend is far more common in Search Labs. Non-position-one AI Overviews are really common in Search Labs right now.

The other thing is this new feature type called Web Guides. And this will often appear in position three or four or two. And it looks like a cross between a regular SERP and an AI Mode result, and that's then appearing itself as a search feature. So it's kind of like a super featured snippet, I guess, except it's not necessarily in position one.

And those contain some regular organic results, which look like regular organic results as well. So they're a bit clickier than AI Overviews. But also, often these sort of have huge walls of what I could less generously call AI slop or more generously call helpful text. But yeah, this is maybe the kind of hybrid experience that we're working towards.

Anyway, I hope you found that interesting. As I say, there'll be some more data in the links below. Thank you very much.