An AI Overview tool does one thing: it queries Google on a list of keywords and records whether a generated answer appears, which sources it cites and whether your domain is among them. It does not tell you how much traffic you have lost, because Google does not publish that figure. If you first need the background on what AI Overviews are and how they work, start there and come back.
On 26 September 2026 we queried Google UK on 13 B2B and commercial queries to see what a tool can actually see in the UK market. Ten returned an AI Overview. Of those ten, two returned neither text nor citations: Google generates them when the request arrives, and a single scan sees only the empty container. When we ran the same test on google.it two days earlier, it was four out of eight. It is the technical limit that no sales page mentions, and it changes how dashboards should be read.
The four levels a tool can cover
Before comparing prices, it is worth knowing what you are buying, because the same label covers very different capabilities.
- Presence: on this keyword the AI Overview is there or it is not. The cheapest level, and the one almost every rank tracker added in 2025.
- Content: the actual text of the answer. You need it to see which claim Google took and from where.
- Citations: the list of linked domains, with their position in the text. It is the only level that tells you whether you are in it.
- History: the same keyword recorded every day. Without it you cannot tell a real change from an unlucky scan, and AI Overviews change a lot: according to Ahrefs the content changes in 70% of cases and the citations in 46%.
A tool that stops at the first level tells you that you are losing ground. One that reaches the third tells you to whom.
What we found on 13 UK queries
The test is small and does not claim to measure how widespread AI Overviews are in the UK: it shows what a tool finds when it queries Google UK in English, on queries that look like our clients' queries. Data collected on 26 September 2026, Google UK, desktop, via the DataForSEO SERP API; the two London queries were run with a London location.
| Query | Intent | AI Overview | Position on page | Text and citations on first call | Sources cited |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| what is an erp system | informational | Yes | 1 | Yes | 6 |
| what is predictive maintenance | technical informational | Yes | 1 | Yes | 8 |
| ecommerce website cost | commercial | Yes | 1 | Yes | 4 |
| hubspot pricing | brand | Yes | 1 | Yes | 7 |
| how to choose a crm | commercial informational | Yes | 1 | No, generated on request | not readable |
| best crm for small business | commercial | Yes | 1 | Yes | 10 |
| how does making tax digital work | informational | Yes | 1 | Yes | 10 |
| machining tolerances | technical informational | Yes | 1 | Yes | 11 |
| warehouse management software | commercial | Yes | 1 | Yes | 6 |
| best solar panels uk | commercial | Yes | 1 | No, generated on request | not readable |
| food packaging suppliers | B2B commercial | No | - | - | - |
| seo agency london | local commercial | No | - | - | - |
| van hire london | local transactional | No | - | - | - |
Three things in this table are worth more than the count.
First: none of the three local or supplier queries triggered an AI Overview. On seo agency london the first thing on the page was the local pack; on van hire london it was a row of comparison sites (Kayak, Momondo, Expedia, Skyscanner) followed by the local pack; on food packaging suppliers the local pack sat under two organic results. A business selling within thirty miles has a different problem from one selling software, and treating AI Overviews as a universal emergency leads to spending against a threat that is not there.
Second: on hubspot pricing the AI Overview sat at the top and six of its seven sources were hubspot.com pages, plus one YouTube video. In our Italian run the same brand query behaved the other way round: the AI Overview was in fourth place, under three organic results, and only one of its five sources was HubSpot, the rest being Italian third-party blogs. Many tools report presence as a yes or no and drop both the position and the source mix, yet an answer generated above the first result and one below the third do not do the same damage to click-through rate.
Third: on ecommerce website cost, a UK search, the AI Overview quoted prices in US dollars (from $30 a month to $25,000 or more), citing Wix, Reddit, Wise and Shopify, while the first organic result, a UK agency, answered in pounds: £2,000 to £6,000 for a basic store. Presence alone would have told you nothing about an answer that is wrong for the market it is shown in.
Part of the AI Overviews cannot be read with a single call
Two of the ten AI Overviews we found arrived with a flag and nothing else: asynchronous_ai_overview. DataForSEO's documentation explains what it means: the flag shows whether Google had the answer cached or generated it on request, and to retrieve the versions generated on request you need a second call with the load_async_ai_overview parameter switched on. It costs more and has to be requested explicitly. In the UK run it was one in five; in the Italian run, one in two. The share varies, the problem does not.
The practical consequences are three, and none is theoretical. A tool that does not make the second call shows you presence and leaves the citations column empty, and you read that gap as "we are not cited" when the data simply was not collected. A tool that makes it on every keyword burns twice the credits, and on a thousand-keyword project the difference shows on the invoice. And if you compare two platforms on the same keyword list, part of the discrepancies you find have nothing to do with data quality: they depend on how many times each one went back to Google.
When you evaluate a tool, this is the question to ask support: do you also retrieve AI Overviews generated on request, and how often? None of the product pages we read states it.
The surface no tool is watching
Twelve of the 13 queries returned a People Also Ask box (the exception was van hire london). In all twelve, the answers inside the box were generated by AI, not extracted from pages: in the raw data they appear as people_also_ask_ai_overview_expanded_element. In the Italian run one query still showed classic featured snippets with links to the source pages; in the UK run none did.
The most awkward finding concerns the queries without an AI Overview. On seo agency london and food packaging suppliers there was no generated answer at the top, but there was one inside People Also Ask. Two out of three. If your monitoring only looks at the main AI Overview, on those keywords the dashboard says AI is not touching you, and that is not true.
The questions Google generates for itself are also keyword research material that no research tool returns. On machining tolerances the fourth question was "What is h6 and H7 tolerance?": a precise technical query, with an answer someone is going to write.
Who gets cited in UK AI Overviews
On the eight AI Overviews that returned the full text we counted 62 citations. The mix explains why a strategy built only on blog articles delivers less than expected.
| Source type | Citations out of 62 | Examples found |
|---|---|---|
| Software vendors and manufacturers' own pages | 31 | Microsoft, SAP, IBM, Xometry, Fractory, and six HubSpot pages on its own pricing query |
| YouTube videos | 14 | four videos, one of them a Short, in a single answer on Making Tax Digital |
| Publishers, review sites and blogs | 11 | PCMag, Startups.co.uk, MoneySavingExpert, Gartner, TWI |
| Reddit threads | 3 | r/ecommerce, r/CNC, r/software |
| Government sources | 2 | GOV.UK and the British Business Bank on Making Tax Digital |
| English Wikipedia | 1 | the "Predictive maintenance" entry |
More than a quarter of the citations are videos or forum threads. On the query what is predictive maintenance, a market we work in, Google put together IBM, SAP, Wikipedia, TWI, Sensorfact, Tractian and two YouTube videos: eight sources, none of them a manufacturer. The same pattern we have seen on technical keywords in our industrial projects, where the real competition is not the local rival but the software vendor that documents things better. What is known about the signals Google uses to pick those sources is collected in our analysis of AI Overview ranking factors.
The tools, grouped by what they can do
Prices and limits below are those stated on the official pages in September 2026. They change often, so the column that matters is the last one.
| Tool | Highest level covered | Other engines besides Google | Stated price | The limit to know first |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Semrush AI Overviews Visibility Checker | Citations | No | Free, account required | Single snapshot, no history |
| SEO.com AI Overview Checker | Citations | No | Free, 3 checks a day | Only analyses the domain's top 100 keywords |
| SE Ranking AI Overviews Tracker | History, with cached copies of SERPs | With the AI Search add-on | Core from $103.20 a month, add-on from $71.20 | AI tracking comes as a separate paid component |
| Ahrefs Brand Radar | History, on 451 million prompts a month | AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot | AI Visibility Index $199 a month, 83 prompts a day | Works by prompt, not by keyword: the list has to be rebuilt |
| ZipTie | Citations on seven engines | Seven in total, including Bing AI Overview | Free trial, pricing on request | Young platform, few independent reviews |
| Thruuu | History, scheduled reports | No | 500 keywords per report on the Pro plan, 5,000 on Agency | No tracking on the free plan |
| DataForSEO | Everything, if you build it | Separate endpoint for AI Mode | From the documentation example, $0.0024 per request | It is an API: without someone to query it, it produces nothing |
The selection rule we use on projects is less refined than it looks. If the client sells in one country and already has a suite, you add that suite's AI Overview feature and stop looking. If it sells in several countries, language coverage decides: SE Ranking says it covers every country where AI Overviews are live, while tools built for the US market often return less than they promise on queries in other languages. If the project has more than a thousand keywords to check every day, the API and a script are the better deal.
A note on scope. In 2026 almost all of these products have moved towards visibility across AI engines in general, ChatGPT and Perplexity included. That is useful, but it is a different measure: appearing in ChatGPT answers and appearing in an AI Overview depend on different signals, and a single index that adds them together hides more than it shows.
Search Console remains the cross-check
Google does not separate AI Overviews from organic results in Search Console reports: impressions and clicks end up in the same pile. The pattern to look for is still recognisable: stable impressions, stable average position, falling clicks. When the three occur together on a group of informational queries, the most likely explanation is that Google is giving the answer and the search ends without a click.
On the order of magnitude, the two most solid independent measurements say this. Ahrefs, comparing March 2024 and March 2025 on 300,000 informational keywords, estimated a 34.5% drop in first-position CTR (desktop sample, United States, by Ryan Law and Xibeijia Guan). Pew Research Center, tracking the real browsing of 900 US adults across 68,879 searches in March 2025, measured clicks on a traditional result in 8% of visits with an AI summary against 15% without, and clicks on the summary itself in 1% of cases.
Both figures are American and desktop, and AI Overviews reached other markets later: the UK in August 2024, together with India, Japan, Indonesia, Mexico and Brazil, Italy on 25 March 2025, with eight other European countries. Applying the 34.5% to a UK project is a method error: it tells you whether to look, not how much you have lost. You measure the loss on your own account.
It also helps to know how much the phenomenon swings. Semrush, on more than ten million keywords, recorded the share of keywords with an AI Overview rising from 6.49% in January 2025 to 24.61% in July, then falling to 15.69% in November 2025. With that much variability, a single scan is not data: it is an anecdote.
How to set up monitoring in an hour
- Export from Search Console the queries with the most impressions over the last three months and keep only the informational and comparative ones. That is where AI Overviews appear: in the Ahrefs sample, 99.2% of the keywords that trigger them have informational intent.
- Remove local and brand queries. In our test none of the local ones triggered an AI Overview, and they use up credits.
- Search twenty of those queries by hand in an incognito window on Google UK. Thirty minutes, and it gives you the benchmark against which to check any dashboard.
- Open the People Also Ask box on each one and note whether the answers are generated or snippets. This is the part tools do not cover.
- Only now choose the tool and load the list, asking support whether they also retrieve AI Overviews generated on request.
- Repeat the manual check once a month on the same twenty queries. Not for the data: to notice when the tool starts telling you a different story.
Step four is the one that always gets skipped, and in 2026 it matters more than the others. On two of the three queries without an AI Overview at the top, AI was answering anyway, inside People Also Ask.
Frequently asked questions
Yes, two. The Semrush AI Overviews Visibility Checker is free with an account and shows mentions and cited pages. The SEO.com AI Overview Checker allows three checks a day on the domain's top 100 keywords. Neither keeps a history, so they are good for a snapshot, not for monitoring.
For three reasons that add up. Google generates part of its AI Overviews at the moment of the request, so two scans close together can return different text. According to Ahrefs data the content changes in 70% of cases and the citations in 46%. And not every tool makes the second call needed to retrieve answers generated on request: those that do not leave the citations column empty.
No. Google adds AI Overview impressions and clicks to those of organic results without separating them. The indirect clue is the combination of stable impressions, stable average position and falling clicks on a group of informational queries.
In August 2024, when Google extended them to the UK, India, Japan, Indonesia, Mexico and Brazil. On 20 May 2025 the company announced availability in more than 200 countries and over 40 languages.
Not much. In our test of 26 September 2026 none of the local or supplier queries triggered an AI Overview: on seo agency london and van hire london the local pack was at or near the top of the page. In those markets it pays to invest in your Google Business Profile and reviews before monitoring generated answers.
One thing the industry rarely says: if Google generates part of its AI Overviews at the moment the query arrives (one in five in our UK sample, one in two in the Italian one), a citation is not a position you win and hold. It is an extraction repeated on every search, and measuring it the way you measure a ranking leads to wrong decisions. The metric that holds up is the share of citations across repeated scans, not presence in one scan. And 14 of the 62 citations we counted were videos: on quite a few technical queries, shooting a three-minute video is worth more than rewriting the article.
If you want to know on which keywords in your sector Google is already answering by itself, and what it cites, it is the first check we run in our SEO for AI engines projects. On how the work is done before visibility arrives, the Macropix case describes the journey from position 88 to position 2 on an industrial cluster, and the logic behind building the pages that answer engines choose is the same.
