Study finds 29.8% of Google AI Overview citations miss the first page of results
A Washington University in St. Louis study analyzed 55,393 Google searches collected between March 13 and April 21, 2026. It found that 29.8% of domains cited in AI Overviews did not appear anywhere on the first page of conventional search results. Researchers attribute this to query fan-out, where the AI breaks a query into sub-queries and can cite pages that answer those instead of the main query. Other analyses from Ahrefs and BrightEdge reported similarly weakening overlap between organic rankings and AI citations. The study also found AI Overviews appeared in 13.7% of searches, most often for natural-language questions, and that cited domains scored higher on credibility measures than the traditional results shown alongside them.
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