We ran 500 auto insurance keywords across all 50 states, three times each, and recorded what the results page actually contained before a single organic link.
Every rank tracker in this category reports position. None of them report what sits above position one, which on half of these searches is a paragraph a shopper can read without ever scrolling. So we measured the page itself rather than the ranking.
| Feature | Share of 500 keywords | Keywords |
|---|---|---|
| AI Overview present | 51% | 255 |
| Local Pack present | 38% | 190 |
| Both present | 22% | 110 |
| Neither present | 33% | 165 |
| Paid results above the fold | 64% | 320 |
Auto insurance · United States · 500 keywords · three-capture median · Jul 14 to 16, 2026
The headline number hides the finding. Split the same 500 keywords by what the searcher is trying to do and the presence rate moves by more than sixty points.
Read that from an agency's point of view and it is better news than the headline suggests. The searches that produce a phone call, quote intent and near me, are the two least likely to be intercepted by an answer. The searches being intercepted are the explainers: what liability limits mean, whether a policy covers a rental, how deductibles work.
Read it from a carrier's point of view and it is worse. Brand and comparison searches, where a carrier expects to control the narrative, now carry an Overview on roughly a third and two thirds of searches respectively.
The 110 keywords carrying an Overview and a Local Pack together are the hardest place in this category to be an organic result. On a desktop viewport the first blue link on those searches sits an average of 1,180 pixels down. They skew heavily toward city-modified coverage terms, which is precisely the set most agency location pages are built for.
| Keyword shape | Both features | Median first organic position, px |
|---|---|---|
| City plus coverage type | 41% | 1,340 |
| State plus coverage type | 28% | 1,120 |
| Cheapest or best plus city | 24% | 1,090 |
| Unmodified head terms | 7% | 880 |
Keywords carrying both an AI Overview and a Local Pack · n = 110 · desktop, 1440px viewport
Three things follow from the split, and none of them is to stop doing insurance SEO.
First, explainer content is no longer a traffic play in this category. Writing a better page about how deductibles work will not recover the click, because the answer is now printed above it. That content still matters, but as citation material rather than as a landing page.
Second, the near me and quote-intent set is where organic and local work still returns directly, and it is the set most agencies underinvest in relative to explainer content.
Third, on the stacked 110, ranking first is worth materially less than it was. Position one below 1,340 pixels of features is not position one in any sense a shopper experiences.
Sample — 500 auto insurance keywords selected by search volume and cost per click, geo-targeted to each of 50 states, captured three times between Jul 14 and Jul 16, 2026. Figures are three-capture medians.
Feature detection — a feature counts as present only when it appeared in at least two of three captures, which removes most single-capture noise.
Intent classification — keywords were classified by modifier pattern, then hand-checked. Classification is a judgment call and roughly 6% of the set could reasonably sit in two buckets.
Coverage — Google AI Overviews only. ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude are separate surfaces and are not measured here.
In this study, 51% of 500 auto insurance keywords returned an AI Overview in at least two of three captures during July 2026. The rate varies from 79% on informational searches to 17% on searches containing near me.
No. On 22% of the keywords tested both appeared together, with the AI Overview above the Local Pack and both above the first organic result.
No. Quote intent and near me searches, which produce most agency phone calls, carry an Overview on 24% and 17% of searches respectively. What changes is where content effort pays back, not whether it does.
The full keyword set is recaptured monthly and this page is updated in place rather than republished, so the URL keeps its history. The dateline above always shows the capture window in use.
We run this exact analysis on your query set, your states and your lines, and send you the composition table with your competitors on it.