In the UK, more than half of what Google cites is not in the search results
Forty B2B buying queries put to Google AI Overviews, four sectors, UK market. The reading was taken on 2 September 2026 and cost 0.16 dollar. Fast Growth Advisors publishes the questions, the answers and the cited sources, with the link to run each search again. Google AI Overviews answered all forty, without exception.
Google wrote an answer to all 40, ten per sector, without exception. It cites 296 sources across 190 distinct domains. Only 46.5 % of them appear anywhere in the organic results.
Does ranking buy as much here as it does in France?
We ran the same measurement on the French market the day before, with an equivalent question set and the same sector structure. The two results are not close.
| What we measured | United Kingdom | France |
|---|---|---|
| Cited sources that appear in the organic top | 46,5 % | 70,2 % |
| Queries where the 1st organic result is cited | 57,5 % | 74 % |
| Queries where one of the top 3 is cited | 77,5 % | 96 % |
On the UK market, ranking first gets you cited on fewer than six queries in ten. In France it is nearly three in four. A UK site that holds its positions and loses its traffic has less to reclaim through ranking work than a French one.
This is a single reading on a single month. It sets the level, it does not prove a trend. The next edition will say whether it holds.
Who does a UK vendor compete with inside Google AI Overviews?
| Nature of the source | Citations | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Websites, vendors and media combined | 234 | 79,1 % |
| Video | 43 | 14,5 % |
| Forums | 17 | 5,7 % |
| Public sector | 2 | 0,7 % |
Only 10,5 % of the cited domains end in .uk. The most cited names are youtube.com, reddit.com, zapier.com and gartner.com. A British vendor is not competing with British competitors for the source slot, it is competing with American publishers.
Video holds 14,5 % of citations here. On the French market, measured the day before on an unrelated question set, it held 15,1 %. Two markets, two question sets, the same share.
Three readings, does the French rule hold?
best payroll software uk. Google names Xero Payroll and Sage UK as market leaders for small and growing teams. Its sources include xero.com and sage.com, alongside reddit.com, rippling.com and money.co.uk. The vendors it recommends are also cited.
comparison hr software uk. Google names Breathe HR for small and medium UK businesses. Its sources are money.co.uk, capterra.co.uk, roothr.co.uk, smallbusiness.co.uk and video. Here the named vendor is not cited at all.
vulnerability management saas. Google explains what the category does, then cites qualys.com, cycognito.com, sophos.com, orca.security, tufin.com and accuknox.com. Vendor pages are the source, exactly as on the French market.
On the French market, across three comparison readings, the named vendor was never among the cited sources. In the UK it sometimes is. The gap between being named and being cited exists here too, but it is not systematic, and a vendor cannot assume either outcome without measuring.
A citation is not a position you hold
We replayed the same question eleven times in a row, seconds apart.
On the UK market, best hr software for small business returned the same eight domains, eleven times out of eleven, without a single variation.
On the French market, the same experiment on comparatif logiciel sirh pme produced the opposite: sources changed from one call to the next, with a median overlap of 62 % and 38 % in the worst pair. Only three domains appeared in all eleven readings.
So there is a stable core and a rotating fringe, and the balance between them depends on the question. Sitting in the core is worth far more than appearing once. A tool that measures a single time cannot tell the two apart, and will report a citation that does not hold.
A caveat: two questions, one per market. This does not say the UK is stable and France is not. It says stability is measured question by question, and we will publish it from the second edition onwards.
Which categories behave differently across the Channel?
Business password managers. Google writes an answer on the UK market, citing reddit.com, pcmag.com and gartner.com. On the French market, two different phrasings produced no AI Overview at all. Same category, same month, two behaviours.
Privacy-focused analytics. The query google analytics alternative gdpr returns Plausible, Fathom, Matomo and PostHog, and every cited source is a vendor page. The French equivalent returns an answer written in English, which we reported as an anomaly rather than correcting it silently.
How was this edition measured?
40 questions, ten per sector, written by hand and never generated. Five comparison and five needs queries in each sector, the same structure as the French set so the two markets can be compared sector by sector.
They were chosen from 52 candidates, all measured before selection. None failed, where the French set lost three out of 65. British spelling was used deliberately: measured on 1 September, optimisation and optimization returned two entirely different sets of sources with no domain in common.
Every reading keeps the raw payload, question by question and date by date, with its own measurement time. Cost: 0.004 dollar per question, 0.16 dollar for this edition.
What will the next edition add?
A series. This one sets a starting level, it measures no change. The indicator we are waiting for is stability: what share of the cited domains changes from one edition to the next. It will say whether this ground is contestable or held.
FAQ
On how many questions did Google write an answer?
On all forty. Ten questions per sector, four sectors, no exception. On these UK B2B buying categories the question is no longer whether Google AI Overviews answer instead of the sites, but whom they cite when they do.
Does organic ranking still matter on the UK market?
Less than in France, and the gap is wide. Only 46.5 % of the sources cited appear anywhere in the organic results, against 70.2 % on the French market. Ranking first gets a UK site cited on fewer than six queries in ten.
Why build a UK question set instead of translating the French one?
Because a translated query measures a market nobody searches in. We also measured that British and American spellings return two entirely different sets of sources, with no domain in common, so the wording itself decides which market you reach.
What does Google answer in your category?
The free diagnostic puts five questions from your category to ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. Answers archived, verification link included, causes read on both the message and the pages.
You will know which of your questions Google writes an answer to, whom it cites instead of you, and which ones deserve no budget at all.