AI Overviews Are Coming for Your Commercial Queries (They’re Up 71%)

Published: July 2026. For most of their existence, AI Overviews were an informational-query phenomenon — great for “how does X work,” largely absent from the searches that precede a purchase. That gave a lot of teams a comfortable excuse: AI Overviews don’t touch my money keywords, so I don’t need to worry about them yet. New data ends that excuse. AI Overviews are moving down the funnel, into the commercial, research-and-compare queries where buyers decide — and they’re growing there fast.

This is a data-and-impact piece, and it pairs with two neighbors. For how to appear in an AI Overview, see ranking in Google AI Overviews. For the broader click-compression this sits on top of, see the zero-click search analysis. This article answers a narrower, sharper question: which queries now carry an AI Overview — and why the answer just changed for your commercial keywords.

The Shift: AI Overviews Move Down the Funnel

Semrush analyzed more than 600,000 keywords in its US desktop database between November 2025 and April 2026, tracking how often each SERP carried an AI Overview and how that changed over the window. The headline: the share of commercial-intent SERPs with an AI Overview grew 71%. These aren’t “what is” queries — they’re the comparison and category searches that sit at the front of a buying decision.

That’s a meaningful move because it changes where the AI answer intercepts the buyer. When AI Overviews lived on informational queries, they mostly siphoned top-of-funnel curiosity clicks. Expanding into commercial queries means the AI answer now shows up while someone is actively choosing a product — reading “best” lists, weighing one option against another, hunting for alternatives. The overview summarizes that comparison before the searcher clicks anything, which is a very different thing from summarizing a definition.

Commercial ≠ Transactional (the Nuance That Matters)

Here’s the part most summaries drop, and it’s the most useful part. The growth is not uniform across “money keywords” — it splits sharply by intent. In the same study, AI Overview presence on transactional SERPs — the pure buy-now queries — actually fell 5%.

Read those two numbers together and the strategy writes itself. The system is inserting AI answers where people compare and decide, and holding back where people transact. That makes sense: a “best project management software” query is answerable in a synthesized overview, while “Asana pricing” or “buy Ahrefs” wants a specific page. So the exposure isn’t evenly spread across your funnel — it’s concentrated on the comparison layer, and that’s exactly where a shortlist gets built.

Why This One Hits Revenue

Losing an informational click stings a little; losing a commercial one stings a lot. When an AI Overview answers “best CRM for small teams” with three named products and none of them is yours, you weren’t out-ranked — you were left out of the consideration set, at the precise moment the buyer narrowed their options. There’s no page-two recovery for that; you simply weren’t in the answer.

The click compression makes it sharper still. AI Overviews reduce click-through on the queries they appear on, and within that smaller pool, the clicks concentrate on the sources the overview cited — which is the whole argument for why being cited protects your traffic. Move that dynamic onto commercial queries and the stakes rise: the click you’re protecting (or losing) is a high-intent, near-purchase one, not a curiosity visit. That’s why a 71% expansion into commercial search is a revenue story, not a vanity-metric story.

Which of Your Queries Are Now at Risk

You can predict most of your exposure from intent alone. The queries that just got riskier are the classic commercial-intent phrases:

• “best [category]” — best CRM, best PM tool, best running shoes.
• “[competitor] alternatives” — where prospects go shopping for a switch.
• “[A] vs [B]” — head-to-head comparisons at the decision point.
• “[category] for [use case]” — best CRM for agencies, best laptop for video editing.

The queries that are lower risk, for now, are pure buy-now and branded-navigational: “buy [product],” “[brand] pricing,” “[brand] login.” Transactional AI-Overview presence slipped, and branded navigation rarely triggers an overview at all. That gives you a clean way to triage: the comparison and category terms are where to look first, and the buy-now and brand terms can wait.

What to Do About It

The response isn’t a new tactic — it’s pointing the AI-Overview playbook at your commercial keywords specifically, and measuring it. Three moves.

1. Audit your commercial keywords for AI Overviews. Pull your “best,” “vs,” and “alternatives” terms and check which now trigger an AI Overview and whether you’re a cited source. You can’t fix exposure you can’t see, and this list is where the revenue risk concentrates.

2. Make your comparison content citation-ready. The overview pulls from sources that answer the comparison cleanly — clear “best-of” and versus content, front-loaded specifics, honest category framing, from an entity the engine can identify. The mechanics are the same as any AI-Overview citation; see how to rank in AI Overviews for the full method, now aimed at your money terms.

3. Monitor it over time. AI-Overview presence is volatile — a query that has one this month may not next month, and vice versa. Track presence and citation on your commercial keyword set continuously, so a drop shows up as a number rather than as a quiet decline in qualified traffic.

The Verdict

The comfortable read — “AI Overviews are an informational thing, my money keywords are safe” — no longer matches the data. AI Overviews grew 71% on commercial SERPs in six months while slipping 5% on transactional ones, so the expansion is landing squarely on the research-and-compare queries where buyers build a shortlist. That’s a higher-stakes surface than the informational one it grew out of: being cited there keeps you in the decision; being absent removes you from it before a click is ever made. Audit your commercial terms, make your comparison content citation-ready, and watch it — because this is the part of the funnel where visibility turns into revenue.

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