- 50.87% of desktop SERPs and 50.73% of mobile SERPs show an AI Overview, across one million French keywords.
- 48% of these AI Overviews load asynchronously: a scraper reading the initial HTML misses nearly one in two.
- One keyword in eight behaves differently on desktop and mobile: you need to collect both.
Key figures
- 50.87% of desktop SERPs show an AI Overview, and 50.73% on mobile. The 0.13-point gap between devices is within the margin of error (±0.13 points at 95%).
- 48.2% of these AI Overviews load asynchronously on desktop (49.0% on mobile): they only appear after the page first renders.
- 12.4% of keywords behave differently depending on the device: 64,715 have an AI Overview on desktop only, 59,232 on mobile only. The two flows offset each other, which is why the overall rates are almost identical.
- The rate peaks on mid-volume queries (56% between 100 and 499 searches) and drops to 27% above 100,000.
Method
The starting corpus holds 5,594,372 French keywords, taken from a base of about 24 million queries after a popularity threshold. We split it into eight search-volume bands and drew a random sample in each, taking the three least populated bands in full. The final scope is 1,000,000 keywords, collected identically on desktop and mobile: 2,150,276 SERPs in total, with zero collection errors.
Results are weighted by the actual size of each band in the corpus. Collection ran from September 9 to 14, 2026 on desktop and from September 12 to 14 on mobile, on Google France, using the Semscraper Google Search API.
AI Overview rate by search volume
| Searches | AI Overview desktop | AI Overview mobile | Synchronous share, desktop |
|---|---|---|---|
| under 100 | 36.9% | 35.0% | 33.1% |
| 100 to 499 | 56.0% | 56.5% | 36.6% |
| 500 to 999 | 51.3% | 51.4% | 51.4% |
| 1,000 to 4,999 | 50.0% | 49.5% | 62.2% |
| 5,000 to 9,999 | 47.0% | 46.1% | 70.6% |
| 10,000 to 49,999 | 41.9% | 41.3% | 73.7% |
| 50,000 to 99,999 | 34.8% | 34.3% | 76.6% |
| 100,000 and more | 27.0% | 26.6% | 73.4% |
The most searched queries are often brands or site names, navigational searches for which Google rarely shows a generated answer. At the other end, the very long tail triggers fewer AI Overviews than mid-volume queries.
Synchronous or asynchronous: a switch driven by volume
A synchronous AI Overview is in the page as soon as it loads. An asynchronous one arrives later, once the page is displayed. The synchronous share rises steadily with volume: only a third below 500 searches, nearly three quarters above 10,000. The switch happens in the 500 to 999 band, where both modes are balanced.
Our reading: Google precomputes AI Overviews for frequent queries and generates long-tail ones on demand. It is a hypothesis, but it matches the steady progression seen across all eight bands.
What it means for your tools
A scraper that only reads the initial HTML sees synchronous AI Overviews and misses the others, nearly one in two, mostly on the long tail. To measure a site's presence in AI Overviews properly, the page has to be rendered in a real browser that waits for them. That is what the Semscraper API does, also returning the brands cited in the text, the citation sources and the source panel: see AI Overviews in the API.
Another lesson: desktop and mobile are not interchangeable. One keyword in eight behaves differently on the two devices. If you track AI Overviews, collect both.
