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Search Insider 2026 · interactive
Where Google clicks actually go now, drawn from 190 million keywords.
In October 2026 DataForSEO published Search Insider 2026, a study of 190 million keywords, 165 million AI answers and 1.1 billion backlinks. Its appendices publish the data tables behind every chart, so the interactive charts below are built straight from them, each citing its table.
One scope note: every search figure here is US and English only. Google ships AI search features to the US first and the UK follows, usually within months, so read these as the curve UK SERPs are on, not their position today.
AI Overviews went from 5.9% of tracked results to 61.4% in two years. Featured snippets, the format SEOs spent a decade optimising for, collapsed to 0.4%. Video results doubled. Click a legend entry to isolate a line; hover the chart for any month's values.
Data: DataForSEO Search Insider 2026, Table A4 · US, English, Sep 2024 to Aug 2026
Pick an intent. The two bars compare the estimated click split for the same searches without and with an AI Overview present. These are modelled estimates from clickstream data, not observed clicks, and the pattern holds across every intent.
Data: DataForSEO Search Insider 2026, Table A3 · US, English, SERP snapshot 7 Sep 2026
Across a panel of 2,000+ websites, desktop CTR for position 1 fell from 17.8% to 7.4% in twelve months, and position 2 fell from 15.3% to 3.1%. Mobile barely moved. Both charts share one scale, so the device gap is real.
Data: DataForSEO Search Insider 2026, Table A2 · US, English, Sep 2025 to Aug 2026
The study tests the obvious escape routes and closes each one. Mid-difficulty keywords trigger AI Overviews most. Cheap and expensive keywords trigger them at nearly identical rates. Commercial queries nearly doubled their trigger rate in a year.
The one variable that genuinely separates sites. Health searches trigger AI Overviews 69.7% of the time; Real Estate, 22.3%. Pick your industry to see where it sits and how its citations split between Google AI Overviews and ChatGPT.
Data: DataForSEO Search Insider 2026, Tables B5, C1, C2 · US, English, Jun to Sep 2026
Google's AI Overviews lean on video and community platforms; ChatGPT leans on reference sources and publishers. Hover or focus a domain to see where it sits on the other side. YouTube is first in Google's list and nineteenth in ChatGPT's.
Bars are scaled within each platform. Citation volumes are not comparable across the two columns.
Data: DataForSEO Search Insider 2026, Tables C3, D1 · US, English, snapshots Sep 2026
Your actual exposure depends on your keywords. The AI Answer Monitor's free exposure check scans the searches that matter to you and reports how often AI answers appear and who gets cited in them. Check a prompt does the same for a single question across engines.