A Semrush study found AI Overviews on 88 percent of tracked commercial keywords by August 2026, up from 45.75 percent a year earlier. The near-doubling in twelve months shows how completely AI summaries have taken over the searches where buying decisions are made.
Commercial keywords are the searches where money is closest: best, review, pricing, comparison, and buy-intent queries. When AI Overviews cover 88 percent of them, the AI summary is no longer an occasional feature of shopping research; it is the default interface for it.
For merchants and affiliates, that means the AI answer is now the storefront window. The products, prices, and recommendations it shows, and the sources it cites, determine which brands even enter the shopper's consideration set.
The year-over-year comparison is stark: 45.75 percent coverage a year earlier versus 88 percent by August 2026. That pace of change is faster than most content strategies, which are planned quarterly or annually, and it explains why many sites felt a sudden traffic shift without a single identifiable update.
The lesson is that AI Overview coverage should be tracked as a trend, not checked once. A category that was uncovered six months ago may be fully covered today, and a content plan built for the old coverage map will miss where shoppers actually decide.
Coverage alone does not explain the full traffic effect, but it combines with a second fact: AI answers satisfy many queries without a click. A shopper who gets a comparison, a price range, and a recommendation inside the answer may never visit any of the cited pages.
That is why the October 15 Google changes, adding more prominent links, thumbnails, and official-site highlights to AI answers, matter so much. They are an attempt to convert coverage back into clicks, and their success will determine whether high commercial coverage is a traffic disaster or a manageable shift for publishers.
First, measure AI Overview coverage for your own money keywords, not just for the market in general. Your category may be above or below the 88 percent average, and the gap determines urgency.
Second, optimise the pages most likely to be cited: comparison pages, buying guides, and product pages with clear pricing, availability, and differentiation. These are the pages that can still win the click from inside an AI answer, because they offer depth the summary cannot.
Commercial AI coverage makes citable commerce content more valuable, not less. The pages AI answers cite for commercial queries are disproportionately pages with external validation: reviews, tests, comparisons, and data studies that other writers have linked to.
Build commerce content that deserves citations: real testing, real prices, real pros and cons, and data no competitor has. In a market where 88 percent of commercial queries get an AI answer, the cited page is the page that still gets visited, linked, and remembered.
High coverage does not automatically mean low clicks, and the relationship between the two is the most important unknown in commercial search right now. An AI answer that covers a query but links prominently to strong sources may still send substantial traffic, while an answer that covers a query with weak links may send almost none.
That is why publishers should measure their own category rather than extrapolating from market averages. Track AI coverage for your money keywords, track referrals to your cited pages, and look at the ratio between the two. The ratio, not the coverage figure alone, tells you whether AI answers are a threat, an opportunity, or a mix of both. Revisit the ratio monthly, because coverage and click behaviour are both still moving fast.
Sources: Semrush study, as reported October 2026.
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