AI Overviews Change Every 2 Days (But Never Change Their Mind)

Just how stable are AI Overviews? If you manage to get your brand mentioned or cited in them, can you take the rest of the month off? Or do you have to fight for ongoing visibility? 

To find the answers, our data scientist, Xibeijia Guan, analyzed over 43,000 keywords—each with at least 16 recorded AI Overviews—over the course of a month.

She extracted this data from Brand Radar, our new AI visibility tool that tracks hundreds of millions of prompts and queries across seven different AI assistants.

Ahrefs Brand Radar dashboard view showing results for Toyota, versus competitors Honda, Nissan, Chevrolet, Ford, Volkswagen

The results reveal a surprising paradox in how Google’s AI operates—a constant state of change on the surface, but a deep, underlying stability.

Keywords Explorer.

Ahrefs SERP overview comparison for "best protein powder" between October 12th and November 1st, 2025, showing 9 changes in Top 10 with 68% SERP similarity. Green highlighting shows maintained/improved positions (Fortune, Forbes articles), red shows declined positions (Reddit, NBC News articles).

Forbes and Fortune showed up consistently between October and November, but the third URL changed.

Initially, a Reddit comment about protein powders took second place, but a month later it was replaced by Fortune’s “best” list, and a new article from NBC on “protein shake safety” entered the third spot.

Here’s one more example for the query “renter’s insurance”—each AI Overview was captured just a week apart.

Ahrefs SERP overview comparison for "renter's insurance" between October 21st and 28th, 2025, showing 5 changes in Top 10 results with 93% SERP similarity, 3 declined positions, and 2 new entries. Green highlighting indicates maintained positions while red shows declined.

The first AI Overview returned three citations, but only two of those carried over to the second capture, where a further ten citations joined the list.

It’s clear that AI Overview visibility doesn’t follow the same consistency patterns as traditional search rankings.

Your brand can be cited today, and gone tomorrow.

Further reading

Despina Gavoyannis from our blog team experiencing exactly that…

Slack message from despina dated July 17th at 1:21 PM explaining that refreshing search results when getting an undesired AI Overview produces different answers with different citations, noting more variation occurs for topics without strong consensus or well-documented responses.
Tim Soulo, had a theory that Google might cache AI Overviews belonging to popular keywords to save on computational resources.

In fact, his hypothesis sparked this whole study…

Slack message from timsoulo dated July 17th at 8:10 AM discussing an interview with Kevin Indig about Google generating AI Overviews for searches, with highlighted text questioning whether it makes sense to cache them for popular queries and wondering about consistency of text and citations.

But the findings disprove this.

Firstly, we’d expect to see far more stability across AI Overview content if some were being cached.

But, as we already know, consecutive AI Overviews showed different content 7 out of 10 times.

Secondly, Xibeijia measured the actual relationship between a keyword’s search volume and its AI Overview change rate, and found a Spearman correlation of -0.014.

Image shows temperature gauge (horizontal line) ranging from -1.0 (strong negative), to +1.0 (strong positive), with a highlight pointing at -0.014, just near the middle "0" (no correlation). Title reads: Search volume and AI Overview changes show no correlation

A correlation this close to zero indicates there is likely no relationship between the two variables—hugely popular search queries are just as likely to have their AI Overview text change as very niche ones.

So, it’s unlikely Google caches popular AI Overviews—at least based on our data.

Wrapping up

AI Overviews are both dynamic and stable at the same time.

The surface details, like the exact wording, URLs cited, and entities mentioned all switch constantly—but the underlying meaning and the core topics stay the same.

This changes how we can think about AI-generated search results.

They’re not static like traditional search results, but they’re not random either.

While you should expect your brand mentions and citations in AI Overviews to be volatile, there’s still a way to show up consistently.

Rather than focusing on individual prompts or queries, you need to become an authority on the themes associated with your core topics.

You can understand which themes AI ties to your brand using Ahrefs Brand Radar.

Just drop in your brand, and head to the “Topics” report. This will show you which themes individual AI responses ladder up to.

For example, Ahrefs is most closely linked to the topics of “SEO tools” and “SEO software” in AI Overview responses.

Ahrefs Brand Radar interface showing Topics tab with AI Overviews filter selected, displaying 2,539 results dated November 3rd, 2025, with top topics being "seo tools" (177 AI responses, 120K volume), "seo software" (131 responses, 90K volume), and "keyword research" (116 responses, 54K volume).

Tracking AI visibility over a volume of answers will also help you see past the variance of AI responses.

Two side-by-side line graphs comparing prompt tracking methods. Left graph titled "Individual prompt tracking" shows sporadic data with red X marks at 100% on Day 5 and 0% on Day 15, with no Day 30 data point. Right graph titled "Aggregate prompt tracking" shows consistent analysis with a green line trending upward from approximately 5% on Day 5, through 40% on Day 15, to 60% on Day 30, with green dots marking each data point.

By focusing on aggregated visibility and AI Share of Voice, you can:

  • See if AI consistently ties you to a category—not just if you appeared once.
  • Track trends over time—not just snapshots.
  • Learn how your brand is positioned against competitors—not just mentioned.
Ahrefs Brand Radar dashboard showing Ahrefs with 84.1% AI Share of Voice leading competitors across multiple metrics, including a mentions comparison table across AI platforms and a time-series graph tracking brand mentions.

Winning the topic, not the query, is the best way to stay visible—even when AI answers are changing daily.

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