What happened
Similarweb pegs AI Overview presence at roughly 43% of Google queries. Semrush puts it around 48%. Both trackers report that informational queries trigger them at even higher rates. So depending on whose panel you trust, somewhere between four and five out of every ten searches your customers run now resolve with a generated answer sitting above the organic results.
The two figures are five points apart. Nobody outside Google measures AI Overview presence directly — every tracker infers it from its own keyword panel and its own crawl cadence. Which means any single presence number you see quoted, including these two, is an estimate with methodology baked in, not a metric Google reports. Treat the range as the finding, and the trend line as the fact.
Why this matters
For a store owner, the practical shift is that ranking #1 and getting the click are no longer the same event. When an AI Overview answers the question, some share of searchers never scroll to the links at all — and your rank tracker will cheerfully report position one while your clicks erode. The metric to watch has quietly moved from rank to click-through rate on the queries that matter to you.
The informational skew is the partial good news. Both trackers report Overviews firing at above-average rates on informational queries — the how, why, and which questions — which leaves the purest buying-intent searches less covered, at least so far. If your traffic mix leans on transactional terms, you are less blanketed than a content site. But your buyers' research phase, the comparison and "which is best" queries that used to land on your guides, is exactly where the answers now appear. That is where citation, not rank, decides who gets the visit.
One more honest note: presence is not the same as damage. An Overview that cites you can send qualified traffic; one that cites your competitor sends theirs. The 43-48% figure tells you the surface exists at scale. It tells you nothing about whether you are on it. That second question is the one you can actually check this week.
What to do about it
Check your own exposure first
Open Search Console and look at the generative-AI reporting for your property to see where AI surfaces intersect your queries. Then compare CTR on those queries against the ones without Overviews. Your exposure is your number — not Semrush's panel and not Similarweb's.
Run your money queries by hand
Take your top 20 revenue-driving searches and run them in Google this week. Record two things per query: does an AI Overview appear, and who does it cite. That 30-minute exercise turns an industry statistic into a competitive to-do list.
Make your best pages citable
Overviews pull from sources that state facts plainly. Specific claims, spec tables, honest comparisons, and clean Product schema give a generated answer something to quote. Vague category copy gives it nothing, and it will quote someone else.
Report on CTR, not just rank
Add a CTR trend column to whatever monthly reporting you run. A stable position with sliding click-through on informational queries is the signature of an Overview absorbing your clicks — catch it in the data before it shows up in revenue.