Google AI Overviews Load Asynchronously, Hiding SEO Data

Image credit: Abondance

PARIS — Nearly half of Google‘s AI Overviews load asynchronously, posing a challenge for search engine optimization (SEO) tools attempting to track their content and citations, according to a new analysis by Monitorank.

The study, which examined 2 million French search engine results pages (SERPs) across desktop and mobile devices, found that 48.6 percent of AI Overviews appeared after the initial page load through a secondary request, creating a data blind spot for traditional scraping methods.

Monitorank conducted its analysis between Sept. 9 and 14, 2026, using 1 million keywords to assess the behavior of Google’s AI-generated responses.

The firm reported that AI Overviews were present in 50.8 percent of the searches analyzed during the study period.

While 51.4 percent of AI Overviews loaded synchronously with the initial page, the asynchronous loading rate increased for long-tail queries, which typically have lower search volumes.

For queries generating fewer than 5,000 annual searches, approximately 51 percent of AI Overviews loaded asynchronously, Monitorank reported. This rate climbed to 58 percent for queries with less than 1,000 annual searches.

Queries with the lowest search volumes exhibited the highest asynchronous load rates. Monitorank found that 86.9 percent of AI Overviews for desktop queries with fewer than 100 annual searches loaded asynchronously, with mobile showing a similar rate of 88.0 percent.

AI Overviews themselves were more prevalent on lower-volume queries, peaking at 64.9 percent for queries with less than 100 annual searches, according to the analysis.

The study highlighted that traditional scraping tools, which typically capture only the initial HTML response of a webpage, will fail to retrieve the content and source attributions of these asynchronously loaded AI Overviews.

This oversight means that SEO professionals and researchers relying on such tools may miss data regarding how Google’s AI summarizes information and attributes sources within these dynamic search results.

Source: Abondance