More than 80% of Google searches in the United States show an AI summary: where does Luxembourg stand?

On 26 October 2026, Search Engine Roundtable brought together the readings of Semrush, SE Ranking and seoClarity: AI Overviews, the summaries written by Google's AI at the top of the results, now appear on more than 80% of searches in the United States, up from 50% in June 2025. On a brand or price search, the first description of a company that a prospect reads is often the one Google composes itself, from pages it selects. In Luxembourg, Google lists the country among those where these summaries are available, in French, German and English, and no study measures how often they appear. Our check of 27 October, on sixteen queries asked from Luxembourg in an everyday browser, met one on all sixteen; a signed-out browser with cookies refused showed only one. Display depends on the search conditions, and companies in the country should look now at what these summaries say about them.

The facts

• Google publishes no display rate for its AI summaries. The 80% threshold comes from tracking tools that query the engine on keyword panels, mostly in the United States and on desktop. Search Engine Roundtable (Barry Schwartz, 26 October 2026) cites SE Ranking (82.5% of US brand searches) and seoClarity (more than 62% of queries, from 55% to 84% depending on the sector), recalls the 50% mark reached in June 2025 and about 15% a year earlier, and reads it as Google's plan to have an answer for every query. The outlet had reported a month earlier the arrival of summaries on brand searches, and even on fake or incorrect queries. The publishers of these readings also sell tracking tools: their figures read as orders of magnitude.
• The SE Ranking study (22 October 2026) checked three times in October, on desktop, 1,000 US brand keywords across 17 sectors: an AI summary appears on average on 82.5% of searches, from 92% in electronics to 58.3% in food and beverages. Brands searched fewer than 50,000 times a month show a summary in 85.2% of cases, against 63.3% for those above one million. On an Ahrefs panel of 100 large global brands tracked in the United States (2 October), 5 triggered a summary on 1 July 2026 and 63 on 30 September, with a sharp acceleration in early September; on 29 September, Ahrefs measured a summary on 82.91% of US brand searches on desktop.
• The summaries move clicks. Seer Interactive tracked 3,119 informational queries for 42 organisations between June 2024 and September 2025: organic click-through rate fell from 1.76% to 0.61% when a summary appears, the click-through rate of ads from 19.7% to 6.34%, and brands cited in the summary obtained an organic click-through rate 35% higher than brands left out. Ahrefs (4 February 2026) measures on 300,000 keywords a click-through rate for the first position 58% lower when a summary is present, between December 2023 and December 2025, and presents the figure as a correlation. On purchase queries, Semrush records 88% coverage in August 2026, which we analysed on 23 October.

The 80% threshold describes the US market, and each tool measures a different scope

The three readings cited by Search Engine Roundtable do not measure the same thing: SE Ranking tracks brand searches, Semrush purchase queries, seoClarity a sector panel. All three curves rise, and fast. The table below gathers the available measurements by market, with their scope, to avoid comparing figures that do not compare. The last row is our own check, limited to sixteen queries and two browsers: it points in a direction, it provides no statistic.

On a brand search, Google cites other pages than the ones that rank

SE Ranking looked at where the links shown in US brand summaries come from. A summary cites on average 2.57 pages from the brand's website, against 1.72 in the first ten classic results, and they are rarely the same: the homepage accounts for 71.1% of the brand's addresses in the organic top 10, but 36.8% of citations in the summaries; product, service or category pages weigh 22.9% of citations (6.1% in organic), About pages 11.7% (3.8%). In all, 62.2% of the brand pages cited do not appear in the top 10 for the same query, while the domain does in 98.3% of cases. Google trusts the site, then goes looking for a page other than the one that ranks.

The study also measures that 61% of citations come from platforms the brand manages or can publish on: its website (33.8%), app stores (4%), its Google Business Profile (2.7%), social networks and video (18.1%, YouTube first). In 85% of brand summaries, at least one source is managed by the company. Large brands have more third-party sources to watch: across 57 summaries in the Ahrefs panel, Wikipedia appears in 71.9% of cases and YouTube in 38.6%. A little-known company is therefore more often presented by a text from Google, and that text is largely built on pages it controls.

Clicks recede, and brands cited in the summary keep more of them

On informational searches, the orders of magnitude from Seer Interactive and Ahrefs converge, between 58% and 61% fewer clicks on the first position when a summary appears. Seer's 2026 update (24 April, 53 brands, 5.47 million queries) shows an organic click-through rate with a summary falling from 3.19% in January 2025 to 1.31% in December 2025, then recovering to 2.36% in February 2026; Seer notes that the summary's presence is frozen at the latest reading and that its projections do not correct for seasonality. On brand searches, the effect has not been measured: the September and October studies count the summaries displayed and measure neither traffic nor conversions.

Brands cited in the summary fare better, with an organic click-through rate 35% higher according to Seer. Once the summary is in place, the issue moves to the citation, and to the way the brand is described in it. Google is trying to answer the pressure from publishers: on 15 October, the engine announced more links, placed higher in its answers, and a test of an official-sites section at the top for some practical queries, without publishing any click data. For Google Ads advertisers, the drop Seer measured on ads is a reminder that the summary also touches the paid budget: a click-through rate that falls at equal position does not necessarily signal a fall in demand.

In Luxembourg, AI summaries are available in three languages, and present on every query in our check

Google's help page consulted on 27 October lists Luxembourg and Belgium among the countries where AI Overviews are available; the languages include French, German, English, Dutch and Portuguese, and Luxembourgish is not among them. Google has never published an announcement dedicated to the country: the European wave of 25 March 2025 named Belgium, in English only at launch, and nine other countries; France only received AI Overviews and AI Mode on 22 July 2026, after the settlement of the dispute over press publishers' neighbouring rights. In April 2026, the tool Peec recorded a summary on 76% of 500,000 queries in the European Union, against 90.3% outside the Union, with a method that does not compare with keyword panels. Germany offers the closest comparison: with the same method as in the United States, SE Ranking finds a summary on 40.4% of brand searches there, and in industry and B2B a stable summary for 10.2% of German keywords against 84.7% of American ones. The sources change too: in Germany, the brand's website weighs 41.2% of citations and the Google Business Profile 6.4%, against 33.8% and 2.7% in the United States.

We ran the test on 27 October 2026, from Luxembourg, on desktop: sixteen queries in French, German, English and Portuguese, including our own brand, agency, bank and insurance searches with the wordings best, reviews, vergleich and vs, and three informational questions. In an everyday browser, all sixteen queries showed an AI Overview; on our bare brand name, aixh, it appears below the results and the business profile, and describes us, from Paperjam and the 1535° Creative Hub listing, with our former positioning: the rewrite of our pages on 24 October has not reached it yet. In a signed-out browser with cookies refused, the same day, a single summary appeared. A one-day check measures nothing, but it establishes two things: the summaries are active in Luxembourg in the four languages tested, and their display depends on the search conditions, which makes any national statistic fragile. The sources observed match those of SE Ranking: the website of the bank cited first on best bank Luxembourg, the Facebook page of MONDORF Domaine Thermal on the search for its name, our site and the Paperjam Bible listing on aixh luxembourg reviews, with the rating and number of reviews taken from our Google profile. On agence seo luxembourg, the summary lists six agencies, ours included, each described in one sentence drawn from its pages. On six banking and insurance queries, the same third-party Luxembourg comparison site, Switchr.lu, appears among the sources, with Reddit and Trustpilot; the two review queries about insurers were summarised from that comparison site and Trustpilot, without the insurers' websites. The local context matters for what follows. According to Statcounter, Google accounted for 80.86% of searches in Luxembourg in September 2026 (Bing 8.84%, DuckDuckGo 6.76%), and 54.48% of searches were made on desktop, the scope of the studies. Most brands in the country are searched fewer than 50,000 times a month, the tier where SE Ranking measures the highest summary rate in the United States. The same company can be described differently depending on the language of the query, because the available sources differ, as we showed for the languages of customers in Luxembourg; and part of the prospects search from France, Belgium or Germany, where the summaries are active, a point we detailed for campaigns targeting cross-border workers.

Seven actions to launch this week

The actions below are our own practice; they are within reach of an SME as much as a large account.

• Search for your brand several days in a row. On mobile and on desktop, note whether an AI summary appears, what it says about the company and which pages it cites. Date each screenshot: summaries change from one day to the next.
• Run the same test on your purchase queries. Choose 5 to 10 searches a prospect would type before contacting you, such as your product reviews, your brand vs competitor, alternative to competitor or price of the service: these are the queries where the summary has settled most in the United States.
• Take care of your context pages. About, products or services, pricing, support, locations: these pages are cited far more often than their position in the results suggests. They must be up to date and consistent with one another.
• Update your third-party profiles. Google Business Profile, LinkedIn, YouTube channel, app listings, review platforms, and Wikipedia if your company has an entry. Outdated information on one of these pages can end up in the summary; in Germany, the Google profile weighs more than twice as much in citations as in the United States.
• Encourage customer reviews. On the platforms that appear in your own results, and within their rules. A negative review left unanswered is part of what Google can pick up in its summary: in our Luxembourg check, the two review queries about insurers were summarised from a comparison site and Trustpilot.
• Measure differently. Search Console, Google's free tool that shows how a site appears in the results, offers a report on performance in generative AI, opened to every site since 31 August 2026. It counts the links shown, without detailing queries, and a brand mention without a link is not in it. Complement it with the brand-query filter and citation tracking, and read a drop in clicks next to these indicators.
• Measure market by market. Luxembourg, Belgium, France and Germany behave neither like the United States nor like their neighbours. Take your readings from each country you target, in each language your customers use.

Classic SEO remains the entry condition: an AI summary relies on indexed pages, from domains Google considers trustworthy. The choice of the page cited and the weight of third-party sources become projects in their own right.

AIxH's view

Reading the summaries on the brand and on purchase queries is part of the AI visibility audit carried out by our GEO agency in Luxembourg, with the list of pages that Google and AI assistants actually cite, language by language. It is carried out together with search engine optimisation, since both rest on the same pages. For Google Ads campaigns, the same readings help read a falling click-through rate without concluding too quickly that demand has dropped. We do not promise a citation share: we measure a starting point, then what moves. If you want to know what Google says about your company today, in French, German and English, a first reading is enough to decide where to start.