AI Overviews in Healthcare Statistics: 2026
We checked 585 of the highest-volume US health searches in Ahrefs, spread across 15 medical and consumer health topics and last crawled between late October and early November 2026. Google showed an AI Overview on 94.7% of them as of the fourth quarter of 2026.
Key Findings
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When Ahrefs reviewed 146 million desktop results in September 2025, about one in five showed an AI Overview, and health sat well above the average of that study. That study described the full range of searches, including millions of low-volume queries. A patient typing a common question about cholesterol or a rash is more likely to land on the popular end of that range, so we looked there.
Our analysts pulled the top searches by US monthly volume for 15 health topics, removed queries that were off topic or had no recorded Google check, and counted how many showed an AI Overview. We then sorted those searches by query type and compared the results against the Ahrefs baseline.
In the following sections, we compare AI Overview rates by health topic, by the kind of question people ask, within near-me provider searches, and against the Ahrefs benchmark.
AI Overviews Appear on Nearly All High-Volume Health Searches
Start with the broad picture across medical specialties and consumer health topics, where the group sizes run close to 40 searches each.
Share of Health Searches Showing an AI Overview, by Topic (Q4 2026)
Topic | Searches | With AI Overview | Share |
Cardiology | 39 | 39 | 100.0% |
Dental | 33 | 33 | 100.0% |
Dermatology | 40 | 40 | 100.0% |
Gastroenterology | 40 | 40 | 100.0% |
Infectious disease | 40 | 40 | 100.0% |
Medications | 37 | 37 | 100.0% |
Mental health | 38 | 38 | 100.0% |
Oncology | 40 | 40 | 100.0% |
Orthopedics | 40 | 40 | 100.0% |
Pediatrics | 40 | 40 | 100.0% |
Costs and insurance | 40 | 39 | 97.5% |
Women's health | 40 | 39 | 97.5% |
Neurology | 39 | 38 | 97.4% |
Endocrinology | 39 | 37 | 94.9% |
Find a provider near me | 40 | 14 | 35.0% |
Key Findings
Ten topics showed an AI Overview on every search we sampled. They range from cardiology and oncology to pediatrics and medications.
Five searches outside the near-me group came back without an AI Overview. They were a thyroid cancer symptom query, a thyroid medication query, a question about ovulation timing, a root canal price question, and a search for the Alzheimer's Association.
People who look up a common condition now usually meet Google's summary first. With coverage this close to complete, there is little room for the rate to climb further on these searches.
Symptom, Treatment, and Cost Searches Show AI Overviews at Similar Rates
The wording of a health search can signal very different needs, from a quick definition to a price check, so we sorted the same searches by the kind of question they ask.
AI Overview Share by Type of Health Query (Q4 2026)
Query type | Example | Searches | Share |
Condition or term | eczema | 267 | 99.6% |
Symptoms | flu symptoms | 99 | 99.0% |
Question | what is pcos | 81 | 98.8% |
Treatment | acid reflux treatment | 50 | 98.0% |
Cost | mri cost | 47 | 97.9% |
Near me | dentist near me | 41 | 36.6% |
Key Findings
Condition, symptom, question, treatment, and cost searches sat within 1.7 percentage points of one another. A price question was nearly as likely to draw an AI Overview as a question about a diagnosis.
Search length made almost no difference once near-me searches were set aside. Every word-count group, from one-word searches to phrases of five words or more, landed between 98.7% and 100%.
People researching a treatment and people looking for a clinic down the street now see very different pages. That gap is the one to watch in future checks of this sample.
Near Me Health Searches Rarely Show AI Overviews Unless They Signal Urgency
Local searches usually put a map near the top of the page, and the words around "near me" turned out to change what Google shows beside that map.
Near Me Searches With an AI Overview, by Search Type (Q4 2026)
Search type | Searches | With AI Overview | Share |
Hours or urgency words | 6 | 6 | 100.0% |
Therapist | 9 | 4 | 44.4% |
Doctor or specialist | 12 | 3 | 25.0% |
Dentist | 12 | 2 | 16.7% |
Urgent care | 2 | 0 | 0.0% |
Key Findings
Near-me searches that mentioned hours or urgency all drew an AI Overview. The group includes "urgent care near me open now" and "24 hour urgent care near me."
The largest plain provider searches did not. "Urgent care near me" and "dentist near me," at 1.59 million and 810,000 monthly US searches, showed a local map and no AI Overview.
Local results still lead this group. Forty of 41 near-me searches showed a local map, and the searches with AI Overviews made up 8.7% of near-me search volume. For a practice, the map listing remains the first thing most local searchers see.
Popular Health Searches Show AI Overviews Far More Often Than the Average Search
A wider study of Google results offers a point of comparison for these counts, with the caution that it measured a different mix of searches at an earlier date.
AI Overview Share in Our Sample and in the Ahrefs Study (2025 and 2026)
Group | Source | Share |
585 high-volume health searches | Signal Hill, Q4 2026 | 94.7% |
Medical YMYL queries | Ahrefs, Sept. 2025 | 44.1% |
Science | Ahrefs, Sept. 2025 | 43.6% |
Health | Ahrefs, Sept. 2025 | 43.0% |
All YMYL queries | Ahrefs, Sept. 2025 | 34.3% |
All SERPs | Ahrefs, Sept. 2025 | 20.5% |
Local queries | Ahrefs, Sept. 2025 | 7.9% |
Shopping | Ahrefs, Sept. 2025 | 3.2% |
Source: Ahrefs, What Triggers AI Overviews? 86 Factors and 146 Million SERPs Analyzed, November 2025
Key Findings
Popular health searches showed AI Overviews at a little more than twice the rate Ahrefs found for Medical YMYL queries. Our sample counts only high-volume searches and was gathered more than a year later, so the gap compares two samples and does not measure growth.
Science and health came in at about the same rate in the Ahrefs study, far above shopping and real estate. Local queries were among the lowest, which matches what our near-me searches showed.
Among health results with an AI Overview in our sample, 58.5% also showed video, 11.7% showed forum discussions, and 10.6% carried paid ads. A health publisher on these pages competes with several other page elements at once, and that crowding is likely to stay as long as Google keeps these formats on the page.
For patients, the practical effect is that a common health question now often gets an answer before any website loads. For hospitals, clinics, and health publishers, ranking for these terms increasingly means being cited inside that answer or competing with it for attention.
Near-me searches are the clear exception. People looking for a dentist or urgent care right now are still mostly shown a map, which keeps local listings at the front of the page.
The wider pattern is a split between health information and health access, with Google answering information questions directly and leaving most local provider choices closer to a directory. So if you publish health content, treat popular informational searches as places where an AI Overview is the default, and treat near-me searches as a separate case.
Methodology
For each of 15 topics, we chose seed terms and pulled the top 40 matching US keywords by monthly search volume from Ahrefs Keywords Explorer, with a floor of 500 monthly searches (200 for cost and insurance terms).
We removed 10 off-topic or non-health results (for example, "heart attack grill" and "great depression"), one search with no recorded Google check, and four searches that appeared in two topic groups, which we counted once under Costs and insurance. That left 585 searches.
An AI Overview was counted when Ahrefs recorded the ai_overview SERP feature for the keyword in the US. Google checks for the sample were last crawled between October 23 and November 8, 2026. Query types were assigned from the wording of each search. Near-me searches include 41 queries containing "near me." Hours or urgency words are "emergency," "walk-in," "open," and "24 hour."
The Ahrefs benchmark covers 146,122,391 desktop SERPs from September 2025 and is not directly comparable with our sample of high-volume US searches. Derived figures, including shares and percentage-point gaps, were calculated from these data.
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