E-commerce· 8/4/2026New
AI Overviews and AI Mode: On Google, Search Is Becoming a Conversational Reflex
A study published in late July 2026 by Similarweb, The Evolution of AI Search, confirms that AI-generated summaries have become an almost systematic part of the Google search experience: in the United States, the share of queries triggering an AI Overview rose from 15% in January 2025 to 43% in May 2026. Over the same period, AI Mode, Google's conversational search interface, saw its active user base more than double, growing from 126 to 279 million between June 2025 and May 2026. Users are also writing increasingly long queries, phrased more like prompts, a shift driven by habits picked up from chatbots. While Google appears to be navigating this transition well — 95% of ChatGPT users still use the search engine alongside it — the trend is putting real pressure on publishers: the presence of an AI Overview is already estimated to cut the click-through rate of the top organic result by nearly 35%, a concern that is becoming very concrete now that AI Overviews and AI Mode have just rolled out in France.
