Google’s AI Overviews exploded from zero to 50% of searches by June 2025, hitting 1.5 billion users worldwide. Entertainment queries jumped 528%, restaurants 387%. Then reality hit hard. Users hated them, especially for shopping and navigation. Chegg sued in February. Click-through rates tanked 61%, advertisers panicked, and costs soared. Google pulled back fast, retreating from commercial queries. The whole experiment basically imploded. The details of this spectacular tech face-plant get even wilder.
The rollercoaster that is Google’s AI Overviews hit another loop in November 2025. After dominating more than half of searches just months earlier, the feature suddenly retreated to less than 16% of queries. Talk about whiplash.
The rise was meteoric. Back in August 2024, AI Overviews appeared in just 25% of search results. Then March 2025 happened. Google’s core algorithm update sent coverage soaring—entertainment queries shot up 528%, restaurants jumped 387%, and travel climbed 381%.
March 2025’s algorithm update sent AI Overviews stratospheric—entertainment queries exploded 528%, restaurants 387%, travel 381%.
By June, the feature crossed the 50% threshold across all devices and query types. Google was effectively rewriting how search worked, reaching 1.5 billion users monthly across 200 countries and 40-plus languages.
The numbers told wildly different stories depending on who was counting. Semrush said July peaked at under 25% of queries from their 10 million keyword analysis. But Xponent21 claimed 60% coverage by November. The truth? Probably somewhere in the messy middle, with most analysts agreeing on “over 50%” when accounting for all devices by mid-2025.
What really changed was the type of searches getting AI treatment. January 2025 saw 91% informational queries—basic stuff like “how to tie a tie.” By October, Google got ambitious. Informational queries dropped to 57%, while commercial hit 18% and transactional reached 14%. The shift hit hardest on longer searches, with queries containing eight words or more being seven times more likely to trigger AI Overviews.
Even navigational queries, virtually nonexistent at the start, grew to over 10% by November.
Then came the reversal. Google apparently didn’t like what the data showed. The feature that once seemed unstoppable suddenly pulled back after testing expansion into commercial and navigational queries. Maybe users weren’t thrilled. The backlash had already started building when Chegg filed its antitrust lawsuit in February 2025, claiming Google’s AI summaries were killing their business model.
Maybe advertisers complained about the 61% drop in organic click-through rates that Seer Interactive documented. Cost-per-click was rising, user intent was getting reshaped, and over 8 billion impressions showed the feature was fundamentally changing how people interacted with search results.
The volatility across those 10 million tracked keywords from January to November tells the real story. Google threw AI Overviews at the wall to see what stuck. Turns out, not as much as they hoped. At least not yet.
