November 3, 2025
The last few months of the year are critical for eCommerce businesses. With Christmas soon approaching, this is the time when many businesses will make a significant chunk of their revenue.
Thanks to a recent study from BrightEdge, which tracked the presence of AI Overviews across thousands of keywords from September to October this year, we have a clearer idea of Google’s holiday shopping strategy for 2025, which could be invaluable for eCommerce businesses.
Let's dive in.
There was a drop in the presence of AI Overviews between September and October last year. However, it was nowhere near as aggressive as this year. This year saw a 56.8% drop, whereas last year it was only 5.6%.
Here’s a timeline of the coverage this year:
The presence of AI Overviews across categories varied quite significantly. Some categories continued to see a lot of AI Overview coverage, while others had almost none.
Categories with the highest retention:
Categories with the lowest retention:
The drastic difference in categories does indicate some prioritisation from Google.
Google kept more research-based content (comparisons, how-to queries, and informative/educational content) but removed those lower down the funnel for terms that had transactional intent - ‘buy’ and ‘deal’ queries.
The analysis suggests that Google deploys more AI Overviews while users are focused on learning about products and comparing them with others, and steps back when they begin making purchases.
Essentially, as the value for informational intent is higher, AI remains, but when user intent shifts to a purchase intent, Google favours traditional search results.
This does align with the findings from a study conducted last year, which concluded that pages with informational intent were prioritised by Google in AI Overviews.
The projection for November and December coverage of AI Overviews (10-11% and 8-9% respectively) also indicates a clear difference in Google’s strategy between the research phase (November) and the purchase phase (December). It wouldn’t be surprising if part of the reason Google pulls back in November is to encourage ad clicks, too.
There are some important implications for marketers and SEOs regarding their strategy over the festive period, which is a crucial time for online retailers.
AI Overviews being prominent during the research phase means how to, comparison, and educational content should be live in November, while product pages should be optimised for December, where purchase intent peaks.
If your research-related content isn’t live in time, you may lose visibility to competitors, who might then gain a competitive edge when the transactional phase begins.
AI Overviews seemingly appear less in home, furniture, and apparel categories than they do for food, TV, and appliances. This drastic difference in category retention means those in categories with high retention will need a different strategy to those in low retention categories.
You need to align your content calendar accordingly. This means publishing and promoting informative and comparative content in November (as early as possible), when users are researching, then shifting this focus to transactional content in December, when users are buying.
For categories where the presence of AI Overviews is much lower, you need to focus on visual content and shopping feeds and deploy a more traditional SEO approach.
For categories where the presence of AI Overviews remains high, you need to prioritise getting buying guides, comparisons, and educational content indexed as soon as possible in order to improve your chances of AI Overview visibility.
For the high retention segments: prioritise publishing and promoting comparison/learning content now.
For low retention segments: ensure your product pages, shopping feeds, visual content (images, videos) are optimised and ready for the peak purchase period.
You may also want to focus on keywords with a search volume of over 13,000 as there was a slight increase in AI Overview presence for high-volume keywords. Albeit the volume distribution wasn’t drastic, but it is something to consider.
Our suggestions are made based on the findings in this research. It’s always important to monitor your own keyword coverage for AI Overviews as we get through November and move into December, and adapt your strategy accordingly.
AI Overviews are still a fairly recent addition to Search and Google is continuously experimenting with where and when to surface AI-powered results. But the findings from this study indicate that aligning your content with the user’s funnel stage and based on Google’s category preferences is essential for staying competitive and visible during the festive season.
If you’d like expert guidance with your content strategy, then get in touch with us today.
