A monthly check of 360 everyday UK Google searches shows how often an AI Overview sits above the links. Questions almost always get one. "Near me" searches mostly do not.
Ask your phone how to get red wine out of a carpet and, before a single website appears, Google has usually written you an answer. Ask it for a locksmith near you and that AI-written box is far less likely to turn up.
Among marketers, one assumption has hardened: AI answers now sit on top of nearly every search, and the clicks underneath are drying up. A smaller camp still treats the AI box as a novelty that appears on trivia and little else. Both views get repeated at conferences and in client meetings. Neither comes with much UK evidence attached.
This analysis checks the same 360 everyday UK searches every month, spread across twelve topics from money and travel to health, fashion and property. In November 2026, Google showed an AI Overview on 253 of them, roughly seven in ten. That figure is high, though some way short of everything. What the searcher is trying to do explains most of the difference.
| Kind of search | Searches checked | With an AI Overview | Share with an AI Overview (%) |
|---|---|---|---|
| How-to and question | 139 | 138 | 99.3 |
| All searches in the panel | 360 | 253 | 70.3 |
| "Near me" | 74 | 15 | 20.3 |
| Group | Searches checked | With an AI Overview | Share (%) |
|---|---|---|---|
| All searches | 360 | 253 | 70.3 |
| How-to and question searches | 139 | 138 | 99.3 |
| "Near me" searches | 74 | 15 | 20.3 |
| Money & finance (highest of 12 topics) | 30 | 25 | 83.3 |
| Fashion & beauty (lowest of 12 topics) | 30 | 17 | 56.7 |
One check per search, on one phone, at one moment
Each search was typed once, on mobile, into google.co.uk. Google changes its results by person, place and moment, so every check is a snapshot of a single moment; someone else searching the same words could see a different page. The 360 searches were picked to cover common kinds of everyday search. They are a fixed panel, chosen on purpose, rather than a random draw of everything people in the UK type into Google.
Questions get an AI answer almost every time
Sort the panel by what the searcher wants and the picture sharpens. Searches that ask a question or how to do something, the "why is my boiler making that noise" kind, showed an AI Overview on 138 of the 139 checked. For anyone who publishes guides, explainers or advice pages, the AI answer is effectively the front door.
That part of the received wisdom fits the data closely. If your audience arrives by asking Google things, assume an AI-written summary is sitting above you.
"Near me" searches mostly skip the AI box
At the other end are the searches with a postcode in mind. Only 15 of the 74 "near me" searches checked showed an AI Overview, about one in five. Someone hunting for a dentist, a takeaway or a tyre fitter mostly still gets a results page with no AI summary at the top.
Set the two ends beside the panel as a whole and the spread is wide. A question is almost certain to get an AI answer, an ordinary everyday search usually does, and a local search usually does not.
Money searches draw the most AI answers of the twelve topics
Topic matters too, though less sharply than intent. Fashion & beauty sat lowest of the twelve, at 17 of 30.
Each topic holds only about 30 searches, so one or two searches flipping either way could shift a topic's position. Read the order as indicative. The gap between the top and the bottom is the part worth quoting. On this panel's evidence, a savings or pension question is likelier to meet an AI answer than a search for a winter coat. Even at the bottom of the table, though, more than half of fashion searches got one.
What this means for UK businesses
If your traffic comes from questions, plan around the AI answer. How-to and advice searches almost always get one, so write pages that answer the question plainly and early, and judge them on whether they earn a place in that answer as well as a click.
If you serve a local area, the ordinary results page still matters most. "Near me" searches mostly appear without an AI summary, so your local listing, opening hours, reviews and location pages remain your front line.
Fashion and beauty came out lowest, but still met an AI answer on most searches.
Treat this as one month's level. It describes where things stood in November, on one phone at a time. Check your own key searches regularly rather than relying on a single look.
The red-wine question gets an essay, and the locksmith search still gets a list. For most businesses, which of those two pages your customers see depends on the kind of search that brings them to you.
How we built it
The panel is a fixed list of 360 everyday UK Google searches across twelve topics: shopping, home, health, money, travel, food, tech, motoring, jobs, legal, fashion and property. Each topic has about 30 searches. Each search was checked once in November 2026 on mobile results from google.co.uk, and the check recorded whether an AI Overview appeared. These are direct observations of what Google showed on that check. Google personalises and varies results, so a single check is a snapshot rather than every user's view. The searches were chosen to cover common kinds of everyday search and are not a random sample of all UK searches, so the shares describe this panel and should not be read as a statistically representative estimate for all UK search. The panel is not weighted by how often each search is made.
Every search was also tagged by kind: how-to and question, product research, ready to buy, or near me. All four groups held at least 30 searches, so none was dropped. Topic-level shares rest on about 30 searches each, so differences between neighbouring topics are indicative only.
The same check also recorded which sites each AI Overview linked to as sources. In addition, the same list of searches was typed word for word into four AI assistants from the UK. ChatGPT and Gemini were read from their free chat apps. Perplexity (Sonar) and Claude (Haiku 4.5) were queried through their developer interfaces with web search switched on, which can give different results from their apps. AI answers vary each time a question is asked, so one answer per search is a snapshot. "Cited" means the assistant linked the site as a source. These results answer a different question from this article, so they appear in the tables below only.
The figures, copy-ready
AI Overviews on the panel (November 2026, mobile, google.co.uk)
What AI Overviews cited (244 overviews that listed sources; 919 different sites cited)
| Measure | Overviews | Share (%) |
|---|---|---|
| Cited youtube.com (most-cited of the 919 sites) | 141 | 57.8 |
| Cited facebook.com (second of the 919) | 60 | 24.6 |
| Cited google.com (third of the 919) | 44 | 18 |
| Cited YouTube or TikTok | 145 | 59.4 |
| Cited GOV.UK or the NHS | 69 | 28.3 |
| Cited Reddit or other forums | 39 | 16 |
| Cited Wikipedia | 7 | 2.9 |
| Cited Amazon | 7 | 2.9 |
| Overviews citing no top-10 organic site | n/a | 26.2 |
Of 1,709 cited sites, 1,405 (82.2%) were not among the first ten organic results for the same search.
AI assistants on the same searches (360 answers each, November 2026)
| Assistant | Answers linking at least one site (%) | Sites per citing answer | Cited sites outside Google's top 10 (%) | Its most-cited site (share of its answers, %) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Perplexity | 100 | 7.6 | 92.6 | gov.uk (12.2) |
| Gemini | 73.3 | 6.8 | 91.4 | gov.uk (7.5) |
| ChatGPT | 51.4 | 2.9 | 91.7 | which.co.uk (10.6) |
| Claude | 25.8 | 4.1 | 96.6 | expertreviews.co.uk (1.7) |
Across all 1,440 assistant answers, the most-cited sites of all those cited were gov.uk (99 answers, 6.9%), which.co.uk (94, 6.5%) and independent.co.uk (66, 4.6%). ChatGPT and Claude cited at least one shared site on 15 of the 77 searches both answered with sources (19.5%), the lowest of the six assistant pairs; Gemini and Perplexity did so on 70.5%, the highest of the six. Gemini cited Reddit or other forums in 22 of its 360 answers (6.1%), against 2 of 360 (0.6%) for Claude.
