TL;DR Summary:
AI Traffic Vanishes: Google Ads search terms reports show almost no visible evidence of AI Overviews or AI Mode traffic, despite Google claiming AI Mode queries are three times longer.Three Markets Match: Analysis across more than 400 accounts in the U.S., U.K. and France found flat query lengths and nearly identical patterns, pointing to a reporting issue rather than regional adoption.Visibility Keeps Shrinking: Google may hide low-volume terms and report only approximated user intent, making exact query language increasingly unavailable to advertisers.Measure With Caution: Marketers should monitor broad match and AI Max trends closely while using specialized visibility tools to track how brands appear in AI search experiences.Why can’t you find AI Overviews traffic in your Google Ads search terms report? A new study of more than 400 Google Ads accounts found that AI search activity in Google Ads search terms reports leaves almost no visible trace, even though Google says AI Mode queries run three times longer than standard searches. That gap matters right now because advertisers in the U.S., U.K. and France are spending against AI-driven search features they cannot clearly measure.
What the data shows about AI search activity in Google Ads search terms reports
Rémi Kerhoas, performance director at Eskimoz, examined Search and Performance Max data from Q1 2024 through Q3 2026. He looked specifically at broad match and AI Max search terms, the categories most likely to carry AI Overviews and AI Mode traffic. The word count of search terms stayed flat across the entire period. Conversion data showed the same pattern. If AI search activity in Google Ads search terms reports were showing up as Google describes it, you would expect to see longer queries appear gradually since May 2024, when AI Overviews launched in the U.S. That did not happen.
U.S. results fail to confirm Google’s three-times-longer claim
The U.S. market had the longest exposure to AI ads, with AI Overviews ads on mobile from late 2024 and AI Mode ad tests starting May 2025. Kerhoas expected this market to show the clearest signal. Instead, broad match search terms showed only a thin slice of long-tail queries, and most AI Max search terms contained just one to three words. That overlaps heavily with what regular keyword targeting already captures. The absence of a trend here works against Google’s public claim that AI Mode queries average three times the length of typical searches.
U.K. and France show the same pattern despite later AI rollouts
France only enabled AI Overviews and AI Mode on July 22, 2026, weeks before this analysis. The U.K. enabled AI Mode on July 28, 2025, with no ads live yet and a Q4 2026 rollout planned. Kerhoas expected these markets to show weaker signals than the U.S. given less mature rollouts. Instead, all three markets looked alike. That consistency suggests the reporting problem sits with Google Ads itself, not with how far along a market is in adopting AI search.
Three reasons AI search activity in Google Ads search terms reports stays hidden
Kerhoas offers three explanations, each with a different confidence level. First, commercial and transactional queries may simply run shorter than informational ones, with low confidence, since the agency’s accounts focus on performance goals and may underrepresent longer queries. Second, with moderate confidence, AI ads may still represent a small share of total ad delivery, consistent with Alphabet Chief Business Officer Philipp Schindler’s comment on the Q3 earnings call about lower monetization in AI Mode. Third, with high confidence, Google’s search terms report does not show prompts as users typed them. Google already omits terms with low query activity, and for AI Mode and AI Overviews it reports only an “approximation” of user intent. Unreported terms already hide about 40% of search term data overall, which compounds the problem. This is precisely the kind of blind spot that has pushed teams toward dedicated platforms like Nuwtonic SEO, which focuses on tracking AI citation and visibility outside of what standard ad reporting can confirm.
What this means for keyword-level visibility in Google Ads
Kerhoas has worked in PPC for 15 years and calls the search terms report one of the tools that used to offer the clearest view into what users searched. That visibility has shrunk steadily as unreported terms, synthetic keyword matching, and AI-approximated terms have replaced literal query data. This leaves paid search reporting looking more like Performance Max search term insights, where exact user language stays hidden.
If you manage Google Ads accounts, check your own broad match and AI Max search terms for word count trends rather than assuming Google’s reporting will reveal them. Watch for any new reporting breakdowns Google adds by AI feature, since current tools do not separate this data cleanly. Until that changes, treat claims about AI search performance in Google Ads with the same caution Kerhoas applied to his own findings. Since Google Ads reporting won’t show you this picture, tools built specifically to track AI citation and visibility, like Nuwtonic SEO, can help fill the gap by monitoring how your brand actually surfaces across AI Overviews and AI Mode responses.
