When a client asks “will AI Overviews hurt our traffic?”, the honest answer is: it depends on your industry. Not slightly, dramatically. 

If you run SEO for a finance brand, you’re dealing with a very different AI Overviews reality than someone working in eCommerce or travel. The trigger rates aren’t even close. And the downstream effects – how much of the page an AIO consumes, how far down your organic result gets pushed, how many links it pulls in – vary dramatically depending on your vertical.

At Advanced Web Ranking, we track AI Overviews appearances across industries through our free Google AI Overviews tool, which we update weekly. What follows is a breakdown of where things stand as of March 2026, across 16 industries. The goal of this report is simple: give you something specific to act on, not just another “AI is changing SEO” think piece.

Here’s what the data shows.

• Finance triggers AI Overviews in 85.77% of searches – the highest of any industry we track. Health (82.46%) and Safety (80.20%) are close behind.
• Brands triggers AIOs in just 11.02% of searches. eCommerce (23.69%) and Insurance (27.16%) also sit well below the average.
• Travel AIOs expand to 1,308.82 pixels – the tallest of any vertical. Technology follows at 1,275.68 px.
• Automotive pushes the first organic result to 1,467 pixels deep when an AIO is expanded. That’s almost certainly below the fold on most screens.
• Technology AIOs average 13.85 links per overview – the highest link density we measured. eCommerce is second at 13.09.
• Brands sources cited in AIOs don’t rank organically 76.38% of the time. That’s the highest non-overlap rate across all industries.

The gap between the highest- and lowest-frequency industries is enormous.

Finance sits at 85.77%. Health at 82.46%. Safety at 80.20%. These three consistently dominate because the searches driving them are almost always informational – people trying to understand something complex, evaluate a risk, or make an important decision. Google has essentially decided that for these queries, a synthesized AI answer beats a list of blue links.

Technology (73.69%) and SEO (69.80%) also maintain high AIO frequency. SEO queries, in particular, peak at three-word queries (46.7% of all SEO-related AIOs), like “how canonicalization works”, which is exactly the kind of thing Google wants to answer directly.

The middle tier – Education (64.66%), Legal (57.80%), Investment (56.34%), Food & Beverage (42.00%) – still sees a lot of AIO activity, but it’s more dependent on how specific the query is. Legal is a good example: three-word queries peak at 33.6%, but once a legal search gets more transactional or location-specific, the AIO tends to drop out.

Below 40%, things get interesting. Real Estate (38.60%), Automotive (36.20%), Travel (32.00%), Entertainment (31.20%), Insurance (27.16%), eCommerce (23.69%), and Brands (11.02%) all show low AIO rates. These verticals are driven more by commercial or brand-specific intent, and Google is still hesitant to synthesize a shopping decision or a brand comparison into a single AI response – at least for now.

That last bit matters. These numbers will shift. The direction they’ve been moving is toward more AIO coverage, not less.

Frequency is one thing. Physical footprint is another.

The tallest expanded AIOs belong to Travel at 1,308.82 pixels, with Technology close behind at 1,275.68 pixels. Safety (1,233.55 px) and Entertainment (1,235.73 px) are also large. At the short end: Brands at just 810.76 pixels, followed by Insurance at 954.50 pixels.

But the number that really matters for SEOs is pixel depth to first organic result – how far a user has to scroll before they see a traditional blue link.

For Automotive, that number is 1,467 pixels. For eCommerce, it’s 1,363.5 pixels. On a standard 1080p screen, you’re almost certainly talking below the fold. The eCommerce situation is a bit of a gut punch: AIO trigger rate is only 23.69%, but when an AIO does appear, it buries the organic results harder than almost any other vertical.

Safety is worth calling out separately. It doesn’t have the deepest push-down (1,417.81 px), but it combines a very high AIO trigger rate (80.20%) with a tall expanded height (1,233.55 px). That’s a compounding problem: AIOs show up in four out of every five searches, and when they do, they’re substantial. Frequency and size hitting together is a worse outcome than either one on its own.

Brands again sits at the shallow end at 1,052.2 pixels push-down for the first organic result – which makes sense given how short its AIOs tend to be (810.76 px).

Not all AI Overviews carry the same amount of content.

Safety AIOs average 341.9 words of written content. Finance is close at 336.1 words. These aren’t quick summaries – they’re detailed, and they reflect the complexity of the queries behind them.

The average query length backs this up.

Safety queries average 5.47 words in length. Finance averages 5.17 words. Brands, on the other hand, averages just 1.27 words per query – almost entirely single-word brand name searches. That difference shows up directly in the content: Brand AIOs average just 259.7 words, with eCommerce close behind at 273.8 words.

The pattern is pretty consistent: longer, more complex queries produce meatier AIOs. That’s not surprising, but the scale of the difference is. A Finance AIO triggered by a six-word query (24.3% of Finance AIOs hit this length) is doing a lot more work on the page than a Brands AIO that fired on a single word.

Technology is the interesting outlier. Its most common trigger is a two-word query (72.2% of its AIOs), yet it produces the highest link density of any vertical – 13.85 links per overview – and one of the tallest AIOs overall (1,275.68 px). Short queries, substantial output. Google seems to have a lot to say about tech topics even when the search is brief.

Every AIO surfaces cited sources as clickable links. How many links appear – and whether those sources also show up in the organic top 10 – tells us something about how Google is choosing what to cite.

Technology leads on link volume at 13.85 links per AIO. eCommerce follows at 13.09. Finance (12.06 links), Health (12.55 links), and Safety (12.21 links) cluster in a similar range. At the low end: Entertainment (10.04 links) and Brands (10.73 links).

The more interesting question for SEOs is organic ranking overlap – do the sites cited in AIOs also rank in the top 10 organically for those same queries?

Safety has the highest overlap at 31.21% of cited pages ranking in top 10. Legal is close at 30.83%. Roughly a third of citations in these verticals come from pages that are already top-10 organic results. That’s a meaningful signal that traditional authority still factors into AIO selection in these spaces.

Then there’s the other side of that metric. In Brands, 76.38% of sources cited in AIOs have no organic top-10 ranking for those same queries. In Investment, that figure is 73%.

For Brands, it’s somewhat expected – brand-name queries often pull from Wikipedia, official brand websites, or structured data sources that don’t rank the same way editorial content does. 

But Investment is harder to explain away. Nearly three quarters of citations in Investment AIOs come from pages with zero top-10 organic presence for those queries. That’s a real gap – and it means that for this vertical, chasing AIO citations and chasing organic rankings may require two different strategies.

AI Overviews are not a single, uniform feature – they’re a moving target that behaves very differently depending on where you sit in the search landscape. A finance team and a travel brand are effectively dealing with two different versions of the same product. The triggers are different, the content depth is different, the overlap with organic rankings is different.

What that means practically is that generic advice about AIOs isn’t going to get you far. Any strategy worth acting on needs to be grounded in what the data actually shows for your vertical – not what’s true on average across all industries.

And this is genuinely still early. The numbers we’re looking at today will look different in six months. Trigger rates are climbing. Google is still figuring out where AIOs fit into monetization. The citation logic isn’t fully understood. 

Staying on top of how this data shifts over time isn’t optional – it’s the whole job right now. We update our free Google AI Overviews tool every week, so if you want to track how these numbers move across industries, that’s the place to watch.