Semrush measured AI Overviews in 88% of commercial keywords

Semrush reported AI Overviews for 88% of a fixed panel of 400 US desktop commercial keywords in August 2026. That result describes the panel, not every Google search. Search Engine Roundtable separately reported on October 26, 2026, that AI Overviews appeared in more than 80% of Google searches.

What Semrush’s 88% measures

Semrush tracked the same 400 US desktop keywords monthly from September 2025 through August 2026. The panel covered banking, ecommerce and software, and grouped searches into five commercial modifiers: alternatives, “best X for Y,” price or cost, reviews, and brand-versus-brand.

The 88% figure is keyword-weighted coverage: the share of those tracked keywords that triggered an AI Overview, with each keyword counted equally. That rate rose from 45.75% in September 2025. In August 2026, the “best X for Y” group had the highest reported coverage among the five modifier groups, at 96.12%; the range across groups was 82.05% to 96.12%.

Semrush also reported 97.08% volume-weighted coverage for August 2026. This calculation gives greater weight to keywords with higher estimated monthly search volume, so it describes the estimated searches represented by the same panel. It is a different measure from the 88% keyword-weighted rate.

Why other published rates differ

The other figures cover different search populations and measurement series. SE Ranking reported AI Overviews on 82.5% of US brand searches. Comscore’s separate desktop-search series rose from 25.8% in July 2025 to 39.4% in June 2026; its release did not specify the series’ geographic scope.

Those percentages cannot be read as measurements of one shared set of searches. Semrush’s panel focuses on US desktop commercial keywords, SE Ranking’s figure covers US branded searches, and Comscore reports a separate desktop series. Their different scopes and methods account for why the numbers vary, without establishing a same-scope disagreement.

Search Engine Roundtable’s October 26 report presented the broader “more than 80%” figure as a synthesis of provider data. Semrush’s 88% result gives a specific rate for its commercial panel; it does not supply a rate for all Google searches, query types, devices and countries.