The news: Google’s AI Overviews (AIOs) have transcended the experimental stage and are becoming a critical component of search for a number of US retail categories, according to our industry KPI data provided by Pi Datametrics.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai said at Google I/O 2026 that more than 2.5 billion monthly active users are seeing AI-generated answers, per TIME, resulting in an acceleration of zero-click search. Pi Datametrics measured Google searches and category presence rates in AIO results.

Why it’s worth watching: AIOs are quickly reshaping brand visibility in high-intent search categories like beauty and electricals and in other retail verticals.

• Beauty-related AIO presence rates in searches surged from 14.5% to 72.4% between Q3 and Q4 2025, while electricals jumped from 9.7% to 64.3% in the same period, per Pi Datametrics.
• Homeware grew from 4.9% to 28.8% and luxury brands went from 1.9% to 21.4% indicating some categories are just beginning to gain momentum.

The challenge: Zero-click visibility is gaining ground, and as a result, brand reach strategies that rely heavily on organic rankings could be becoming less sufficient on their own.

AIOs now correlate with a 58% lower average click-through rate (CTR) for the top-ranking pages, per Ahrefs, a trend that’s likely to continue as users become accustomed to queries being answered directly on the search results page, reducing the need to click on links.

Implications for brands: Content strategies have to coalesce around authoritative, structured, and conversational data that AIOs like to surface. 

• Assume customer personas, test use cases, and run typical searches to understand AIO dynamics while adapting to the latest Google Search features to overcome declining CTR.
• For brands in homeware and luxury that are still in earlier stages of AIO adoption, there’s a larger window to optimize content to be cited within results before competition intensifies.