BrightEdge report AI Overviews on 48% of tracked queries, with 17% citation overlap among top-ranked pages

On about 48% of queries tracked by BrightEdge in February 2026, Google’s AI Overviews appeared — up from roughly 30% a year earlier. At the same time, only about 17% of sources cited in those AI-generated summaries also ranked in Google’s organic top 10, according to BrightEdge’s Generative Parser research.

The findings suggest that conventional search rankings and visibility in AI-generated answers are increasingly separate outcomes. The firm said its analysis covered February 2025 to February 2026 and found that roughly five of six AI Overview citations came from content outside the top 10 organic results.

What the data shows

The growth of AI Overviews means users may receive an answer without visiting a website, even when that site performs strongly in traditional organic search.

The citation overlap is the more consequential metric for publishers and businesses: a page can rank first for a query yet not be among the sources used in the AI Overview for that query. BrightEdge reported that the 17% overlap had remained broadly stable during its tracking period.

The Malaysian adoption context

Separate research commissioned by Amazon Web Services has found that 38% of Malaysian businesses polled had consistently used at least one AI tool in 2026, up from 27% in 2025.

The study had estimated that more than 3.4million Malaysian businesses in the research data now use AI in some form. Adoption does not necessarily mean strategic deployment. The study found that 67% of AI adopters mainly used basic applications such as public chatbots or ready-made tools, while 19% had a formal strategy to scale AI across multiple functions.

Implications for search strategy

For organisations that depend on search traffic, the data points to three practical areas:

  • Publishing content that directly and clearly answers common customer questions
  • Structuring business and product information so search engines and AI systems can interpret it reliably
  • Measuring appearance in AI-generated answers and citations, rather than relying solely on keyword rankings

The figures do not establish that AI Overviews reduce website traffic overall, nor do they show which optimisation techniques most improve citation rates. However, they can indicate that ranking position alone is becoming an incomplete measure of search visibility as generated answers occupy more of the results page.