New: 46% of Real Estate Searches Produce an AI Overview

After the rocky launch of AI Overviews (AIO for short) in May that forced Google to dial back how often they appeared, the tide is turning.

AI Overviews made a significant visibility jump in real estate in July.

Of the 250 real estate keywords I track, 46% are showing an AI Overview as of August 5th.

That's a huge jump from July, when only 6% (9 of 140 keywords) of my tracked keywords showed an AIO. When I began studying this back in June, only 4 of 101 real estate keywords showed an AIO.

My current group of 250 keywords aligns with the longstanding breakdown of search intent*: 10% are commercial keywords, 10% are navigational, and 80% are informational.

A few extra nuggets about this month's data:

• Of the 115 keywords with an AIO now, 59 did not show an AIO on July 1.

• 114 of the 115 are informational keywords; the other is commercial.

• Only 10 of the 115 include a location in the query; the rest are general searches/questions about real estate.

I should also point out that AIOs are constantly changing. There's a great local keyword that was showing an AIO last weekend -- and my wife had 2 of the 3 source links for it. But this weekend, the AIO is gone.

Google also continues to tweak how the AIOs look, how sources are shown, etc.

*Members of my mastermind community can access the exact list of 250 keywords, sorted by search intent and with all changes tracked since June.

What it means?

I'll start with what it doesn't mean: It doesn't mean "panic time" for real estate agents.

I haven't seen anyone in any industry say that they're suffering huge traffic losses or search visibility because of AIOs. For my wife, since AIOs launched in February, her search impressions are up slightly while search clicks are down slightly. But that could be because her website is now ranking for 4-5 local keywords that have nothing to do with real estate.

That said, I'd be lying if I said I'm not concerned at all. I'm a little concerned at this point. But we're not going to change our approach to using Cari's blog and website to answer the questions that buyers and sellers Google every day with high-quality, non-AI-written content.

And I'll keep an eye on these 250 keywords again next month, so stay tuned.