Most brands still don’t have a clear picture of how much traffic AI Overviews are sending them. Google hasn’t given us a clean signal for AI Overview traffic in Search Console, making it difficult to know how much organic traffic is coming from AI Overviews, which content is driving it, and how accurately that traffic is being reported.
So we built our own tracking.
Since September 2025, I’ve been capturing AI Overview referral data for one of the brands I manage in the transportation industry. From September 2025 to June 2026, we recorded 51,200 tracked events across 1,661 cited snippets.
The data shows that AI Overview prominence in the SERP isn’t stable. It also reveals clear patterns in the types of content Google cites, how those citations change over time, and how much of that traffic gets misattributed in analytics.
Here’s what nine months of tracking revealed — and what it means for SEO reporting, content prioritization, and GEO.
The tracking setup — and why it works
The methodology is straightforward, but most teams haven’t implemented it.
When a user clicks on a cited snippet inside a Google AI Overview, Google sometimes appends a #:~:text= fragment to the destination URL. We created a custom dimension in GA4 that fires whenever a session lands with that fragment present.
It’s not a perfect signal, but it’s the most reliable one available without waiting for Google to expose this natively in Search Console. The fragment is already sitting in your GA4 data. You just need to surface it.
Once we had it captured, we grouped snippets into thematic categories and started analyzing patterns. A few things stood out immediately.
- Concentration is high: The top-performing snippet alone drove 2,276 events. The average across all 1,661 snippets is 31. Like most things in SEO, a small number of pages are doing the bulk of the work.
- Snippets have lifecycles: Some peak during a specific period and then fade — usually when query intent shifts seasonally or when the content becomes stale relative to what Google is now preferring to cite. Others emerge months after publication and keep climbing. This makes freshness and specificity more important than you’d initially assume.
- Content prioritization gets sharper: The most useful output of having this data is that it makes decisions more grounded. When you map snippet volume and growth trajectory against your current content investment, the gaps become visible.
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Certain topic types got cited
In our case:
- Transfer time content and pricing content are already being cited frequently with clear upward momentum. The play there is to refresh and expand the existing content.
- Destination guides are underperforming relative to what the data suggests they could be driving.
- Structured transport comparison tables, formatted as actual HTML tables, are punching well above their weight in terms of citation frequency — which tells you something about how AI Overviews are selecting content to surface.
The broader pattern is consistent with what most people working in GEO are finding: AI Overview citations favor content that is specific, structured, and directly answers a well-defined question. Times, prices, named routes, comparison formats. Not vague editorial.
22.4% of AI Overview traffic is being misattributed to Direct
This was the most striking finding.
When we started plotting the dataset on a GA4 exploration report, we noticed that a meaningful portion of traffic arriving via AI Overviews was being attributed to the Direct channel rather than Organic Search.
We know AI Overviews only exist within Google Search. Traffic from there should be attributed to organic. So we built misattribution tracking into our AI Overview dashboard and started measuring it on a monthly and weekly basis.
Across the full dataset — more than 50,000 AI Overview events over nine months — the average misattribution rate was 22.4%.
That’s 11,468 AI Overview events attributed to Direct instead of Organic. The range varied by month:
- Worst month: May 2026 – 29.3% of AI Overview sessions were misattributed to Direct.
- Best month: April 2026 – 16.8% were misattributed.
The implications for SEO reporting are significant. Depending on your total organic traffic volume and how much AI Overview referral traffic you’re generating, you could be materially underreporting organic performance without realizing it.
AI Overviews are driving 7.53% of organic sessions — but it’s volatile
Using the same first-party dataset, we built a percentage metric to track what share of our total organic sessions came from AI Overviews each period.
From September 2025 to June 2026, 7.53% of organic sessions came from AI Overviews.
But the distribution is not flat:
- At its peak in February-March 2026, it reached 16-17% — meaning nearly one in six organic visitors arrived via an AI Overview.
- More recently (as of writing), it has trended down to around 2-4%.
That volatility is notable. It suggests AI Overview prominence in the SERP is not stable — it fluctuates based on query type, Google’s confidence in available content, and possibly broader algorithmic changes. Brands treating AI Overview traffic as a fixed percentage of organic are likely miscalibrating their models.
The caveats you should know
Two important limitations with this approach:
The #:~:text= identifier isn’t exclusive to AI Overviews
The same fragment is used by Featured Snippets and People Also Ask results. So some portion of what we’re capturing may bleed from those formats.
We did run the exercise in Ahrefs to check our Featured Snippet exposure, and at the time of checking, we were included in fewer than 30 — largely because we don’t target terms that typically trigger Featured Snippets.
In practice, we believe AI Overviews are the dominant driver given the volume and the period of data collection, but it’s not a perfectly clean signal.
The metric compares events to sessions
Our custom dimension in GA4 is event-scoped, not session-scoped. The AI Overview share percentage therefore compares events against sessions, which isn’t an ideal comparison.
It’s better than nothing — and it’s directionally accurate — but worth knowing if you replicate this.
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What this means practically
If you’re not tracking this yet, start. The setup isn’t complex, and the signal — imperfect as it is — is the best first-party data you’ll get until Google decides to surface this natively.
A few things to take away from nine months of data:
- Structured, specific content wins. Times, prices, routes, named comparisons. Not editorial padding.
- Freshness matters more than you think. Snippets have lifecycles. Stale content loses citation share.
- Your organic traffic is likely underreported. If ~22% of AI Overview events are going to Direct, your channel reporting has a systematic gap.
- The share is volatile. Don’t treat a peak month as a new baseline.
The #:~:text= fragment is sitting there in your GA4 data right now. You just need to surface it.
Special thanks to Simant Sah for helping collate the data and put together the report where the screenshots come from.
