AIBRIEF
The AI generated summaries appear in nearly half of US Google queries, up from 15% a year earlier, with the average query itself getting 5.4% longer.
Google's AI Overviews, the AI-generated summaries that appear within standard search results, now show up in 43% of US Google searches, up from 15% a year earlier, according to Similarweb's 2026 Generative AI Landscape report.
The shift tracks a change in what people type. The average Google query is 5.4% longer since the introduction of AI Mode, Google's separate conversational search surface. Users now lean toward more natural-language prompts. Visits to AI Mode's web experience roughly doubled to 279 million in May 2026 from 126 million a year earlier.
Google separately reported that AI Mode surpassed 1 billion monthly users in May 2026. Similarweb's 279 million is a model-based estimate of web visits, not a directly comparable user count, and the two figures cover different parts of the Google Search experience.
The wider generative-AI web is growing on the same trajectory. Generative-AI sites averaged 9.5 billion monthly visits between June 2025 and May 2026, up 70% year over year, with 655 million monthly unique visitors, a 57% jump, per the same report. Similarweb's traffic figures draw on first-party analytics, anonymized device data, and external partnerships; they are modeled, not direct counts. A third-party methodology critique flagged the 43% measurement as thin, a useful caveat before treating it as Google's confirmed share.