Search in 2026: the year the answer moved to the top

In September 2024, 6% of the searches DataForSEO tracks showed an AI Overview. By August 2026 it was 61%. Over the same two years featured snippets, the boxed answers that used to sit in that spot, all but disappeared, and forum results fell by two thirds. Videos and local maps both grew.

The UK looks further along. On the searches we checked, 85% showed an AI Overview, and in 90% of those it was the first thing on the page. We found no featured snippets at all. The two samples are not like for like, but the direction is the same.

Ranking first still matters. It just pays less than it did. On desktop, the share of people clicking the top result fell from 17.8% to 7.4% in a year. On mobile it dipped and recovered, ending at 20.8% from 25.2%.

DataForSEO is careful to say the data cannot prove why. But when an AI Overview appears, its own links take an estimated 42 to 45% of the clicks, and the top result’s share falls from about 35% to about 21%. That holds whether someone is researching, comparing or ready to buy.

AI Overviews began on information searches. They have moved down the funnel fast. Searches where people compare options, the ones closest to a shortlist, nearly doubled from 26% to 51% in a year. Searches to buy or book went from 11% to 29%.

The usual shelters do not help much either. Smaller, easier and more expensive searches all show AI Overviews at about the same rate as the rest, or more often. Choosing quieter keywords is no longer a way round it.

The spread between sectors is wide. In the US, health and finance searches show an AI Overview about 70% of the time. Property and restaurants show one less than 30% of the time.

Our UK sectors split the same way. Healthcare, charities, employment and investing searches almost always carried one. Home and interiors, and our own sector, carried far fewer, and the reason is the map. Where Google showed a local map, an AI Overview appeared on 47% of searches. Without one, it was 97%.

An AI Overview names a handful of sources, a median of 4 in our check. Being one of them is the new first place. In the US, YouTube is quoted more than anyone, with Reddit, Facebook and Wikipedia behind it. ChatGPT leans the other way, towards Wikipedia, reference sites and news publishers, and more than a quarter of its answers cite nothing at all.

In the UK, YouTube led again, quoted in 37% of the AI Overviews we saw that named a source. Public bodies such as GOV.UK and the NHS were quoted in 36%. Reddit, so strong in the US, was in 6%.

The figure that stopped us was this one. Across six businesses, on the searches each most wants to win, the business itself was quoted in 7% of the AI Overviews. The other answers quoted someone else.

None of this makes the old work pointless. Sites ranking first have 31% more linking websites than those in positions four to ten. Sites quoted for the hardest searches have more than five times the links of those quoted for the easiest. Sites with more websites linking to them tend to be quoted more often, in Google and ChatGPT alike. It is a pattern, not a proof, but it is a clear one.

The one thing that has barely changed is us. Most searches are still three or four words. But longer searches are growing, especially on desktop, where searches of five words or more went from 29% to 35% of the total in a year. People are asking whole questions, and getting whole answers back.