SISTRIX tracked around 1 million UK keywords and found more than 80% now return an AI Overview. Retailers have caught up fastest: searches where Go Outdoors ranks carried an AI Overview 21.5% of the time on 31 August and 87.4% on 9 November.
Dominic Coutts
The AI answer is no longer something that happens to informational searches. If you sell things online, the box above your listing is now the normal state of the page, and your Black Friday reporting needs to separate what people saw from what they clicked before anyone reads a drop as a failure.
What happened
SISTRIX published UK data on 11 November showing that more than 80% of the roughly 1 million keywords in its UK Visibility Index now return an AI Overview, a level reached over the last 100 days. The sharpest movement is in retail. Searches where Go Outdoors ranks carried an AI Overview on 21.5% of occasions on 31 August and 87.4% on 9 November. Measured from 1 April, gooutdoors.co.uk is up 78.2 percentage points and currys.co.uk up 67.5. Over the same period reddit.com is up 27.6 and theguardian.com 23.0. SISTRIX says AI Overviews used to appear less often on brand, news and commercial searches, and that is no longer the case.
What it means for you
This measures how often an AI answer appears, not how many clicks it took. SISTRIX publishes no click figures alongside these numbers and Google has announced nothing, so nobody can tell you what it has cost you. The appearance rate still settles something concrete: whether your listing is the first thing on the screen or the second. Ranking first in November buys less space than ranking first did in August, and that gap tends to show up as falling clicks against steady impressions.
What to do
- Pull Search Console for your top 20 product and category pages and compare impressions against clicks from 1 September to now. Steady impressions with falling clicks is the pattern to look for.
- Put the caveat in the Black Friday report before the numbers arrive rather than after.
- Read the AI Overview on 5 of your own product searches. If the price, stock or delivery detail it quotes is wrong, your product pages and structured data are where that gets fixed.
SISTRIX
Worth doing something about this week.
You still rank. But Google's answering for you.
More signals
Get a focused review of how your business is found, where competitors win attention, and what to change to generate more of the right enquiries. You leave with a plan you can act on, whether we do the work that follows or not.