AI feeds are showing up less and less often in Google Search, with a new report showing them in less than 10% of searches.
It’s been a little over two months since Google launched AI Overviews to all search users in the US, and the fallout has been severe… for Google. While many feared that AI Overviews would take away large swaths of the internet from individual websites, massive, viral bugs produced by AI Overviews led Google to seemingly scale back the project en masse.
Data published in early June showed that Google had gone from showing AI overviews in 80% of searches for preview testers to 40-50% when the feature first launched widely in May. In the weeks following viral failures like putting glue on pizza, that number had dropped to just 15%.
Now updated figures show that Google may have further relaxed the measures.
Search Engine Country reports, again with data from BrightEdgethat Google is only showing AI Overviews in about 7% of searches by the end of June. That’s down from 11% at the beginning of the month.
Breaking that down further, the report claims that AI Overviews appear in half of education-related searches (up from 26% to 13%), only 9% of e-commerce searches (down from 26%), and “nearly 0%” of entertainment-related queries (down from 14%). After viral misfires largely stemming from Reddit, AI Overviews also appear to be using Reddit in their answers much less often.
Anecdotally, we’ve also noticed that AI Overviews are barely showing up anymore. They just rarely show up anymore, and even in places where they used to. Previously, we noticed that AI Overviews were showing up most often in searches that were phrased as a direct question. But now, even simple queries like “is the pixel watch waterproof?” result in Google showing a Featured Snippet and links instead of an AI-generated answer.
How about you? Have you seen AI Overviews lately? Vote in the poll below and let us know in the comments whether you prefer Search with or without AI Overviews.
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