Similarweb has released the Generative AI Landscape Report: in May 2026, AI Overviews appeared in 43% of queries. In January 2025, it was 15%. That's a 28-point increase in 16 months.
Then everyone rushed to write "SEO is dead." I deal with these numbers every day on client projects, so here are a couple of clarifications that get lost in the retellings.
First: 43% is for the USA. Not the world, not Ukraine, not Kazakhstan. Similarweb measures the American search results. We are experiencing a rollout with a delay, so you are looking not at today but at your near future.
Second: this is not a measurement but a model. Similarweb does not have data from Google — they estimate based on their panels and external sources. Hence the variance with others.
What to do about it if you have a website: don’t rewrite everything for GEO, but categorize pages into informational and commercial and focus only on the former. Traffic is leaving from there.
And a grounded point from the last few weeks. I regularly come across websites that block AI bots themselves, and the owner is unaware. Cloudflare cuts them off with two different mechanisms — not just through robots.txt; there’s also a separate switch for protection against AI crawlers that returns a 403 and activates automatically. So a person thinks about how to get into the AI answer, while their CDN is responding to GPTBot with "403, go away".
Check this first — five minutes of work; without this, all "AI optimization" simply doesn’t work. Don’t want to do it yourself - write to me!
Source: Similarweb Generative AI Landscape Report
