"AI Overviews appear on about half of searches" is the number everyone repeats, and a single average hides what drives it. Whether Google shows an AI Overview is decided almost entirely by intent. We ran matched prompt sets across five query types and measured how often each one triggered an AI Overview.
Published July 5, 2026 · cloro themed prompt corpus · ~1,900 prompts across six engines
98% → 3%
AI Overview trigger rate swings from ~98% on commercial and voice queries to ~3% on local restaurant queries. Intent, not topic, decides whether Google's AI answers. Your query mix sets your exposure.
Local ≈ off
For "restaurants near me"-style intent, Google almost never shows an AI Overview (3%). It hands the query to the map pack instead. AI search and local search still barely overlap.
Only Google is selective
ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot returned an answer on 100% of prompts in every theme. The conversational engines always answer. Google's AI Overview is the one surface that decides whether to appear, so "does AI answer this query?" is mostly a question about Google.
Ask Google to compare products and an AI Overview is close to guaranteed. Ask it where to eat tonight and one almost never appears. Share of prompts in each theme where Google rendered an AI Overview, from matched prompt sets run through cloro's monitoring.
Sort your keyword list into these buckets before planning any AI Overview work: a commerce-heavy list meets one on nearly every query, a local list almost never.
Intent decides the level; over time, the blended rate barely moves. Tracking a fixed panel of the most-consistently-monitored Google queries every week, the AI Overview trigger rate has held in the mid-70s for four months: ~69% in early March, a ~78% peak in May, then ~67% most recently.
Waiting for a wider rollout is not a plan: a shift in your own AI Overview coverage points at your query mix or your pages, not at Google.
If you're forecasting AI-search exposure for a set of keywords, the blended "~50%" figure will mislead you in both directions. A commercial-heavy keyword set is almost fully AI-answered (~98%); a local-service set is barely touched (~3%). Score your own query mix by intent before assuming how much of it AI Overviews actually reach.
It also reframes what "AI search optimization" means per surface. On the conversational engines, the answer always renders, so the question is whether you are named in it. On Google, the prior question still stands: will an AI Overview appear for this query at all? For commercial and informational intent, plan for yes; for local intent, plan for the map pack.
Matched, stratified prompt sets (~1,900 prompts) were run through six AI engines: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, Google AI Overview, and Google AI Mode. "Trigger rate" is the share of a theme's prompts where a given surface returned an answer; the figures above are Google's AI Overview surface. Themes are directional groupings of intent (commercial, voice-style, brand, travel, local dining), not an exhaustive taxonomy. Read them as a spread across intent rather than as precise category boundaries.
cloro. (July 5, 2026). AI Overview Trigger Index: How Query Intent Decides Whether AI Answers. cloro Research. https://cloro.dev/research/ai-overview-trigger-index/
More studies from cloro's monitoring corpus are in the research index.
cloro reports whether an AI Overview triggers — and who it cites — for any query, live. Start with 500 free credits a month.
