Google AI Overviews now appear on roughly 47% of Canadian commercial-intent queries we sample — nearly double the Q1 2025 rate of 24%.
We probe a fixed basket of 240 Canadian commercial queries (e.g. 'dentist Toronto', 'best Calgary law firm', 'ecommerce SEO Vancouver') from a Toronto-based clean-cookie environment, monthly. AI Overview rendering rose from 24% in January 2025 to 47% in March 2026. The expansion is concentrated in informational-with-commercial-intent queries; pure transactional queries ('book dentist appointment Toronto') still see AI Overviews on under 20% of probes.
Methodology
Monthly probe of 240 fixed Canadian commercial queries from a clean-cookie Toronto environment, Jan 2025 – Mar 2026.
Limits of this finding
Single-geo probe (Toronto). Quebec and Western Canadian rendering rates may differ. Probe frequency is monthly so day-level volatility is invisible.
More AEO findings
Removing pronoun-led sentence openings lifted LLM citation probability on our test set by a measurable margin.
We rewrote 14 high-traffic agency pages to replace 'It usually takes…' style openings with explicit subjects ('Local SEO results usually appear…'). Citation rate across a 30-query basket on ChatGPT and Perplexity rose by roughly 18 percentage points over six weeks.
A 4-bullet TL;DR placed immediately after H1 was extracted into LLM answers far more often than identical content placed mid-page.
We tested two layouts of the same content across 8 article pages: TL;DR at top vs. TL;DR after the first body section. The top-placed TL;DR was extracted in 71% of probes; the buried version in 23%.
Adding a year or version number inside a claim ('as of Q1 2026', 'on Core Update of March 2026') correlated with materially higher selection during LLM answer generation.
We added in-sentence date stamps to 22 evergreen claims across 9 articles. Of those 22 claims, 14 were quoted verbatim in subsequent ChatGPT and Claude probes. The unstamped control set (also 22 claims) had 6 verbatim quotes.
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