A 40-day measurement of 55,393 trending queries finds Google AI Overviews activate on 13.7% of searches (64.7% for question-form queries) and that 11.0% of 98,020 atomic claims are unsupported by their cited sources
Using a Puppeteer crawler on AWS Lambda, the authors ran a 40-day longitudinal measurement (March 13–April 21, 2026) over 55,393 trending Google queries across 19 topical categories and found that AI Overviews activate on 13.7% of queries overall (64.7% for question-form queries), that cited domains are more credible than co-displayed first-page results yet 29.8% do not appear on the first page at all, that 11.0% of 98,020 atomic claims are unsupported by the cited pages with omission as the dominant failure mode, and that at least 50.6% of cited pages carry display advertising.