We Measured Google AI Across Seven Countries: It Runs Local Search in Australia and Is Switched Off in Ireland

I ran the same Google searches in seven English-speaking countries, on the same two days. In Australia, more than half of local “near me” searches now open with an AI answer. In Ireland: none. Same language, same Google, and the gap runs from 54.5% all the way to zero. This is the story of where Google’s AI has taken over, and the one honest reason I can find for why.

Most of what gets written about AI search is guesswork, and almost all of it is about America. I wanted real numbers. So I collected them myself: 3,261 real searches across seven countries, all measured the same way. The full data is free to download at the end.

First: what is an AI Overview?

When you search Google now, you often don’t get a list of websites first. You get an answer written by Google’s AI, sitting at the top of the page before anything else. Google calls it an AI Overview, and here’s what it looks like.

The AI reads a handful of websites, writes a short answer from them, and quotes a few as sources. The websites you’d normally click start further down the page. If the AI has already answered the question, many people never scroll past it. This study measures one simple thing: how often that box now appears, across seven countries.

What I measured

Around 460 real searches per country, pulled from Ahrefs and built the same way in all seven markets: questions, comparisons, shopping and local searches. For each one, I recorded a single fact. Does Google open with an AI Overview or not?

One thing to be clear about: these numbers describe my sample, which leans toward the searches businesses care about, not all of Google. Measured across everything people search, the rate is lower; a US study by Pew Research put it at 18% of real searches. The fair test here is country against country, because every market was measured exactly the same way, and nobody had done that before. Now someone has.

The league table

Here’s the whole study in one chart.

Two countries, Australia and Canada, have had AI arrive on local search in a big way. The other five have barely seen it. This is the finding that made me re-run my numbers, twice, convinced something was broken. It wasn’t.

It’s not abstract, either. “Food near me” opens with an AI Overview in Australia and doesn’t in the US. Same for “restaurants near me”, “pharmacy near me” and “childcare near me”. Australians now meet an AI on the supermarket run. Americans still get a map.

Why so uneven? One clear answer, two hidden switches

Everything above is measurement. This section is my reading of it, labelled as such.

The clear answer is regulation. Ireland is the only EU country in the study, and it sits at zero. That’s not a coincidence. Europe has the world’s strictest rules for tech companies, which is why AI Overviews arrived there ten months after America, and why Google kept France switched off until July 2026 during a fight over paying news publishers. A Google executive even said it out loud: Europe’s rules mean “users in Europe will have a less good product experience.” Ireland speaks the same English as Australia. Opposite rules, opposite result.

Why local search, specifically? Because local is where Google’s money and Google’s risk both live. Searches like “plumber near me” are surrounded by ads and map listings that earn Google billions, and an AI answer there eats its own revenue. A wrong AI answer there also hurts real people: think of someone sent to a pharmacy that’s closed. And in Europe there’s a third problem. Regulators have already fined Google billions for putting its own results ahead of competitors’, and an AI answer on a local search is exactly that move. So AI arrives on local search last everywhere, and in the EU it hasn’t arrived at all. Google has never said any of this out loud. It’s what the pattern in the data points to.

What it clearly isn’t: size or money. Tiny New Zealand sits near the bottom. Giant India sits low. And the US, Google’s home and richest market, is second last. Whatever drives this table, it isn’t population or GDP.

AI answers questions, not purchases

Inside every country, the same pattern holds. The closer a search is to a question, the more likely the AI answers it. The closer it is to a purchase, the more likely Google still sends the click to a website.

Look at the top row. If your content strategy was built on ranking for “what is” and “how to” posts, that’s the number to sit with. The classic explainer article now competes with a machine that has already written the answer above it.

The good news is the bottom of the chart. When someone’s ready to buy or hire, Google mostly still wants that page for ads and shopping. Your money pages are, for now, far safer than your blog.

The biggest searches the AI now answers? The cricket and the chemist

Sort each country’s AI-answered searches by size and you get a national portrait. Australia’s number one is the cricket scorecard, at 978,000 searches a month. Then it’s the errands: “woolworths near me”, “kmart near me”, “food near me”, “chemist near me”.

Britain’s list is topped by “what time is strictly on tonight”. America’s includes “how many days until christmas” and, my favourite, “what is doodle for google”: a million Americans a month asking Google’s AI to explain Google to them.

Ranked #1, ignored by the AI

For the US and Australian samples, I compared each AI Overview’s cited sources against the regular results below it. In roughly three in ten cases, the page ranking first on Google wasn’t among the sources the AI quoted.

Ranking first no longer guarantees you’re the answer.

Google says clicks to websites are “relatively stable” overall. That can be true while a third of top-ranked pages quietly get cut out of the answer. Averages are a great place to hide who’s winning and who’s losing.

So who is the AI quoting instead?

I counted the cited domains. In the US, 7 in 10 AI Overviews quote YouTube at least once. Reddit turns up in about 3 in 10. Wikipedia, the site everyone assumes owns these answers, appears in roughly 1 in 10.

The AI’s favourite sources aren’t articles. They’re videos and forum threads, the two formats most content plans still treat as an afterthought.

One thing I couldn’t prove, and won’t pretend to

I wanted the scary headline: “AI Overviews cost you X% of your clicks.” My data can’t measure that fairly, because AI Overviews mostly appear on popular topics, and popular topics get more clicks anyway. So this study measures where the AI has spread, and makes no claim about clicks lost. I’d rather publish a smaller true thing than a bigger false one.

What I’d do about it in 2026

• Write to be cited, not just to rank. A third of the time, the top blue link and the quoted source aren’t the same page.
• Take video and community seriously. The AI quotes YouTube more than any website, and Reddit more than most brands.
• Weight your effort toward commercial content. That’s where the clicks still live, in every market measured.
• Make it easy for AI to know who you are. AI quotes sources it can identify and double-check. Clear, consistent information about your business beats another pile of posts.
• Know your country’s weather. In Australia or Canada, AI already reshaped local search: act now. In the US, UK or EU, you’re watching a preview: prepare now.

Content isn’t dead. The bar moved. What wins now is the stuff a machine can’t fake: real expertise, written so both people and AI can use it. That’s the entire idea behind SEO Sandwich.

Three predictions, on the record

• Australia and Canada are the front line. Where they are today is roughly where the UK and US land once the brakes come off. If you want to see American local search in 2027, look at Brisbane now.
• The EU stays behind on purpose. Regulation is the one lever in this table that clearly moves the number, and it moves it down.
• “Best X” is next. Comparison content, the layer most agencies still call safe, is already at 75 to 79% AI coverage.

I’ll re-run these exact searches in February 2027 and publish the movement. If I’m wrong, you’ll read it here first.

Check your own numbers, then come and argue

A five minute exercise: search your five most important keywords. Does an AI Overview appear? If you rank on page one, are you one of its cited sources? If not, you’ve just found the same gap I did, on your own site.

Every chart and number here is free to reuse with a link back to this page. And you don’t have to ask for the data: download all 3,261 searches as a spreadsheet. Tell me what you found, agree or disagree, through the contact page. The most interesting replies get a follow-up piece.

Full methodology and data

Study by Victoria Laurenzi at SEO Sandwich, a Matter Solutions service. Data dated 7-8 August 2026. Companion piece: what people actually ask ChatGPT and Claude. Want the data or to challenge the method? Get in touch.