We asked Google 518 questions ourselves, from the Dashcrab team, using GEO Observer, our Chrome extension. This is not a survey or a user sample: we picked the questions by hand to cover several industries and markets, and captured exactly what Google showed for each search. In total we counted 10,913 AI citations across the AI Overview and AI Mode. 99.8% of the searches showed an AI Overview, and 47.45% of its citations already ranked in the organic SEO results for that same search. Ads, on the other hand, barely show up: only 0.03% of AI Overview citations came from a paid ad. But the number that matters most is a different one: the moment we asked a follow-up and moved to AI Mode, 85.29% of the citations were completely new sources. Your SEO gets you into the AI Overview. It guarantees you nothing in AI Mode.
What we measured, and why this is our own research and not a survey
This is not passive web scraping. It is our own field work: we picked the 518 searches, typed them into Google, and used GEO Observer to capture exactly what each SERP returned. We built the sample to cover several industries (health, fintech, marketing, brand protection, fitness, among others) and two markets, Argentina and the United States.
We worked with four surfaces, all from the same SERP and the same session:
- AI Overview (AIO): the citations that appear at the very top, before you do anything else.
- SEO: organic results.
- Ads: the paid results.
- AI Mode: the citations that appear when we ask a follow-up, inside the same session.
Of the 518 searches, in 452 (87.3%) we asked at least one follow-up question and moved into AI Mode.
The AI Overview cares about your SEO. Ads barely exist to it
This is the good news, and it is worth saying first: the AI Overview does not invent a world apart from the one you already know. Of the 3,899 URLs cited in the AI Overviews we analysed, 47.45% also ranked in the organic pack for that same search. Seen from the other side: of the 4,348 URLs appearing in organic SEO, 42.55% ended up cited in the AI Overview.
With Ads the opposite happens. Of all the ads we saw, only 0.03% ended up cited in an AI Overview. That is 0.03% of total AIO citations, and 1.03% of total ads. For all practical purposes, paying for Google Ads does not get you closer to the AI Overview.
This should not be surprising if you think about what the system is optimising for. The AI Overview builds an answer, it does not pick auction winners. An ad is written to convert someone who has already decided to click; the content the AIO cites has to read like a source answering the question, not like an offer. Those are two different writing jobs, and the second one is what the model needs.
What you should not lose sight of: more than half of AIO citations (52.6%) come from neither your SEO nor your Ads. Ranking helps, but it does not explain half of what the AI Overview decides to show.
AI Mode is not a zoom on the SERP. It is another search
Here is the twist that makes sense of the rest of this post. Of the 452 searches where we reached AI Mode, 389 contained citations (the rest is the model's own knowledge). And what happens in there breaks the intuition that if you are already in the AI Overview, you have won:
| From SERP to AI Mode | URLs in the SERP | Persist as citation | % |
|---|---|---|---|
| Organic SEO | 3,224 | 644 | 19.98% |
| AI Overview citations | 3,058 | 794 | 25.96% |
| Ads | 75 | 0 | 0.0% |
In round numbers: if you ranked organically, the citation survives 1 in 5 times. If you were already cited in the AI Overview, it survives 1 in 4. Not a single paid ad survived even once, out of 75 paid URLs appearing in those same searches.
And on the other side, AI Mode does not only discard: it also multiplies. The average goes from 7.53 citations per AI Overview to 14.98 citations per AI Mode turn, almost double. Of those new citations, 85.29% were not in the SEO results, the Ads, or the AI Overview of that same search. They are sources the model brings in from elsewhere, at the moment the question stops being generic and becomes more specific.
A follow-up question almost always tries to go deeper, compare, or ask for something more concrete. In our own sessions the follow-ups looked like this: which one suits me if I bill under USD 10,000 a month, does this work in Argentina, how do I set it up step by step, what is the difference with the other one. Even though it comes from the same session, it is no longer the same question. It makes sense that the system searches again instead of recycling the same handful of sources: the problem changed, and the sources that worked for the generic question do not necessarily work for the specific one.
For anyone measuring AI visibility only by whether they appear in the AI Overview, this matters: that number measures the first instant of the conversation, not what the person asking ends up seeing.
Reddit is not the winner. YouTube and social are
There is a widespread belief that AI-generated content favours forums and wikis: Reddit, Wikipedia, review sites. In this sample, that is not what happens.
| Source type | AI Overview | AI Mode | Organic |
|---|---|---|---|
| YouTube | 7.72% | 4.86% | 1.72% |
| Social (Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok) | 8.36% | 5.98% | 6.10% |
| 1.13% | 1.21% | 2.06% | |
| Wikipedia | 0.44% | 0.17% | 0.56% |
| Review or ranking (G2, Trustpilot) | 0.05% | 0.10% | 0.04% |
YouTube plus social add up to 16.08% of AI Overview citations. Reddit and Wikipedia together add up to 1.57%. The difference is an order of magnitude, not a nuance.
What is interesting is where that gap shows up: in the classic organic pack, YouTube is worth just 1.72%. In the AI Overview it jumps to 7.72%, more than four times as much. The AI Overview does not inherit SEO's proportions. It actively over-weights video and social content.
A YouTube video tends to answer the question in a format the model can summarise confidently (transcript, chapters, a demonstrative tone). And a generative answer benefits from a source that shows how something is done, not just explains it. If your category lends itself to that (fitness, personal finance, tutorials, marketing), a well-structured video can weigh more for the AI Overview than an old-school optimised blog post.
The industry changes the rule
The AI Overview does not behave uniformly. It changes depending on how mature and standardised the category's knowledge is. These numbers are indicative: the per-industry sample is small, so read them as a trend, not as statistical certainty.
| Industry | AIO found in your SEO | SEO reaching AI Mode |
|---|---|---|
| Comparisons (best X) | 58.52% | 16.05% |
| Fintech and finance | 56.05% | 12.50% |
| Health and medicine | 50.21% | 24.10% |
| Marketing, Ads and GEO | 49.71% | 13.57% |
| Fitness and sport | 37.01% | 2.13% |
| Brand protection and MAP | 37.20% | 21.71% |
In health and fintech, the AI Overview looks a lot like your SEO (between 50% and 56% overlap): these are categories where a consensus already exists about which sources are trustworthy, such as Mayo Clinic, NIH and MedlinePlus on the health side, or Stripe, NerdWallet and Investopedia on the financial side, and the model tends to cite the same thing that already ranks. In brand protection, a smaller B2B vertical less covered by generic content, the AI Overview breaks away from SEO and goes straight to specialised vendors like Corsearch, Wiser and GrayFalkon.
The most extreme case is fitness: only 2.13% of what ranks in SEO survives into AI Mode. In practice, the follow-up restarts the source search from scratch.
In categories with an established body of authority (health, regulated finance), ranking well and being cited in the AIO tend to be the same fight. In niche categories, technical decisions or highly personalised ones (brand protection, fitness), the AI Overview and especially AI Mode will look for the most specific source for the case, even if that means leaving out whatever dominates the organic pack. That is a concrete reason not to measure your AI visibility with a single global number: it depends on how standardised your category is.
One pattern that does repeat across all ten industries we measured: no paid ad ever reached AI Mode. Zero, without exception, in all ten.
If you had to boil all of this down into one decision: ranking in SEO is still the entry ticket to the AI Overview, but it is not the whole strategy. Half of AIO citations and the vast majority of AI Mode citations come from elsewhere (video, social, sources specialised in the category), and that matters more the less standardised your industry is. Measuring only whether you appear in the AI Overview gives you half the picture.
We put this study together with GEO Observer, the same extension that feeds the AI visibility dashboard our clients use. It is free, has no usage limit, and installs in under a minute. If you want to see what AI is citing about you, not about us: install GEO Observer.
Data from 518 searches we ran ourselves on Google with GEO Observer, between July 11 and August 5, 2026. Overlaps computed per URL within the same search (SERP plus AI Mode follow-up).