Which SaaS get traffic from Google AI Overviews?

Are Google AI Overviews actually important for SaaS now?

Google AI Overviews are already a major part of SaaS discovery because they appear constantly on the questions people ask while choosing software.

The scale is now hard to dismiss. Google says AI Overviews reach more than 2.5 billion monthly active users. More importantly for SaaS, they show up heavily on searches such as comparisons, recommendations and product questions.

Citera analyzed around 350,000 B2B SaaS articles competing across 10,382 keywords and 52 software categories. AI Overviews appeared on 87% of comparison queries and 83% of question-format queries. Another controlled study covering 1,000 queries across 40 software categories generated an AI Overview 979 times.

That puts AI Overviews directly inside searches like “best CRM for a startup,” “HubSpot vs Salesforce,” “best observability tools” or “alternatives to Zendesk.” Those searches happen while buyers are building their shortlist, rather than months before a purchase.

The trend is also moving further down the funnel. Semrush analyzed more than 600,000 keywords across ten industries and found that AI Overview appearances on commercial-intent searches increased 71% over six months. Transactional searches fell slightly, by 5%.

So SaaS companies currently face AI Overviews most heavily during product research and comparison, which is exactly where appearing in Google’s answer can change which vendors get considered.

Can we actually tell how much traffic Google AI Overviews send to SaaS companies?

We can measure Google AI Overview visibility reasonably well today, but we still cannot build a clean public ranking of SaaS companies by AI Overview clicks.

That limitation is important. Google counts clicks from AI Overview links inside Search Console, but it does not provide outsiders with a simple database showing how many visits HubSpot, Figma or Datadog received specifically from those links.

Third-party traffic tools cannot reliably solve the problem either. A Google visit to Figma may have come from an ordinary blue link, an AI Overview citation or another Search feature. Once all of them arrive through Google, separating them from the outside becomes difficult.

Citation studies therefore tell us which SaaS companies repeatedly appear inside AI Overviews. CTR studies tell us whether being cited makes clicks more likely. Individual companies can sometimes tell us whether AI discovery generates leads.

Those three datasets can be combined, but they should not be confused with one another. Anyone publishing an exact leaderboard of “SaaS companies getting the most AI Overview traffic” is currently claiming more precision than the public data supports.

Do Google AI Overviews reduce clicks to SaaS websites?

Yes. Google AI Overviews still reduce the amount of organic traffic available on many searches, even though recent data shows the decline may have stopped getting worse.

Ahrefs compared hundreds of thousands of queries and found a major reduction in click-through rates when an AI Overview appeared. In its updated analysis, the estimated CTR loss for the number-one organic result reached about 58%, with positions two and three down roughly 51% and 46%.

Seer Interactive found the same general pattern across 5.47 million tracked queries and 2.43 billion organic impressions. Organic CTR on searches showing an AI Overview hit a low of 1.3% before recovering to 2.4% in early 2026. Searches without an AI Overview were still higher, at 3.8%.

That recovery is worth mentioning because the story has changed slightly. AI Overview CTR is no longer falling every month. But it remains below ordinary Search CTR, and ranking underneath an AI answer is clearly less valuable than occupying the same position on a page without one.

Google says overall organic click volume from Search has remained relatively stable and that clicks generated after AI experiences tend to be more engaged. That can be true at the platform level while individual publishers still lose clicks on searches where Google answers more of the question itself.

For SaaS companies, the practical point is simple: AI Overviews shrink many click pools, so getting included inside the answer becomes more valuable.

Does getting cited in a Google AI Overview actually help a SaaS get traffic?

Yes. Being cited inside a Google AI Overview gives a SaaS a much better shot at the remaining clicks than simply ranking underneath the answer.

Seer Interactive tracked this through 2025 and found that pages cited inside an AI Overview generated roughly two to five times the organic CTR of pages on AI Overview searches that were not cited.

The absolute traffic opportunity may still be smaller than it was before AI Overviews. But within that smaller pool, Google is redistributing clicks toward the sources it shows inside the generated answer.

This creates a meaningful difference between two SaaS companies that rank similarly. If both appear on page one for “best product analytics software” but Amplitude is cited inside the AI Overview while a competitor remains only in the organic results, Amplitude has another prominent route to the user.

Google has also been adding more links inside AI answers, including inline citations and richer source previews. Its own experiments found that adding inline links increased traffic toward supporting websites.

An AI Overview citation should not be treated as equivalent to a visit. Still, the evidence makes it hard to argue that citation visibility has no traffic value.

Which SaaS appear most often in Google AI Overviews today?

Figma, Outreach, Amplitude, HubSpot, Google Analytics, Highspot, Zendesk, Semrush, Mixpanel and Datadog are among the clearest current winners in Google AI Overview visibility.

One of the most useful recent datasets comes from notedbyai, which audits 312 B2B SaaS companies across category-defining buyer questions. Its latest audit was refreshed only days ago, making it unusually current for such a fast-moving search surface.

The methodology tests products across several answer engines, but Google AI Overviews are broken out separately. That lets us avoid treating generic ChatGPT visibility as Google visibility.

Figma reached a 100% Google AI Overview citation rate across the queries tested. Outreach reached 96%, Amplitude 93%, HubSpot 92%, Google Analytics 89%, Highspot 88%, Zendesk 87%, Semrush 86% and Mixpanel 85%.

These percentages do not mean that 100% of all Google searches mention Figma, or that 93% of searches send Amplitude a click. They show how consistently the brands appeared when Google generated answers to the buyer questions used in the audit.

SaaS	Category	Google AI Overview citation rate
Figma	Design & prototyping	100%
Outreach	Sales engagement	96%
Amplitude	Product analytics	93%
HubSpot	CRM	92%
Google Analytics	Website analytics	89%
Highspot	Sales enablement	88%
Zendesk	Customer support	87%
Semrush	SEO	86%
Mixpanel	Product analytics	85%
Datadog	Observability	83%

Is Figma the clearest SaaS winner in Google AI Overviews?

Figma currently has one of the strongest Google AI Overview positions we found, with a 100% citation rate across the design-software buyer queries tested.

That result becomes more convincing when we look beyond Google. Figma ranked first across the full 312-company notedbyai dataset with 98.1% visibility across several AI engines. It reached 100% on ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, 96% on Grok and 93% on Perplexity.

A company can occasionally spike on one AI engine because of how that system retrieves information. Figma’s visibility keeps appearing across very different systems, which makes the result harder to dismiss as an algorithmic quirk.

Its category also leaves room for clicks. Google can explain what Figma does or compare it with another design tool, but someone looking for templates, plugins, pricing, examples or the application itself still has a reason to visit Figma.

We cannot prove from public data that Figma receives the most AI Overview clicks of any SaaS. We can say with much more confidence that almost no SaaS company currently has more consistent visibility inside Google-generated software recommendations.

Is HubSpot actually turning AI visibility into customers?

HubSpot is one of the strongest cases where heavy AI visibility has clearly turned into real customer acquisition, although the company does not isolate Google AI Overviews from every other AI source.

HubSpot currently appears in about 92% of Google AI Overview runs in the CRM audit. Salesforce reaches 76%, Zoho CRM 63% and Pipedrive 53%.

The more interesting evidence comes from HubSpot itself. Between Q1 2025 and Q1 2026, HubSpot says qualified leads coming from AI-generated answers grew 1,850%. Those leads converted at up to three times the rate of traditional search traffic. HubSpot separately reported a 433% increase in AI citations.

Those figures combine several AI discovery channels, including systems such as ChatGPT and Perplexity, so attributing all of that growth to Google would be wrong.

Still, the overlap is unusually strong. HubSpot ranks near the top of the CRM category specifically in Google AI Overviews while also reporting that AI discovery has become a measurable source of qualified pipeline.

That gives us something most AIO visibility studies cannot provide: proof that the broader behavior behind these citations can end in revenue rather than stopping at impressions.

Why do Amplitude and Mixpanel appear so often in Google AI Overviews?

Amplitude and Mixpanel currently dominate Google AI Overview visibility for product analytics because Google repeatedly pulls them into the same high-intent category questions.

Amplitude reached a 93% Google AI Overview citation rate in the recent SaaS audit, while Mixpanel reached 85%. PostHog was further behind at 66%, and Heap reached 46%.

The size of that gap is more interesting than the absolute percentages. These companies compete for closely related searches such as “best product analytics platform,” “funnel analysis tools” and “user behavior analytics for SaaS.” Yet Google keeps returning to Amplitude and Mixpanel much more often.

Both companies also have large libraries of content that answer product questions from different angles: technical documentation, analytics definitions, implementation guides, integrations and comparison pages. That gives Google more usable source material around the same brand.

As of now, product analytics is one of the clearest SaaS categories where AI Overview visibility has become concentrated around two names rather than spread evenly across established competitors.

Product analytics SaaS	Google AI Overview citation rate
Amplitude	93%
Mixpanel	85%
PostHog	66%
Heap	46%

Are technical SaaS companies also getting strong Google AI Overview visibility?

Yes. Datadog, LaunchDarkly, Contentful, Sanity and GitHub Copilot show that technical SaaS can perform extremely well in Google AI Overviews.

Datadog currently reaches an 83% Google AI Overview citation rate in the recent audit. LaunchDarkly also reaches 83%, Contentful 82%, Sanity 81% and GitHub Copilot 79%.

The competitive gaps inside individual categories can be huge. In observability, Datadog’s 83% compares with 56% for New Relic, 46% for Dynatrace, 29% for Honeycomb and 26% for Splunk.

Technical software has a useful advantage: documentation answers a huge number of searches directly. Queries involving Kubernetes monitoring, feature flags, APIs, integrations or implementation details often require precise technical information. Vendor documentation can be the best available source.

Google is also willing to pull citations from beyond the pages already dominating its normal rankings. Ahrefs recently analyzed four million AI Overview URLs across 863,000 keyword results and found that only 37.9% of cited URLs also appeared within the first ten Google result blocks for the same query.

A technical SaaS therefore has more ways to surface than simply forcing its homepage to number one. Strong documentation can become its own entry point into Google’s generated answer.

Are SEO SaaS companies unusually good at Google AI Overviews?

Yes. Semrush and Ahrefs are particularly visible in Google AI Overviews, and the amount of original research they publish appears to give them an advantage.

Semrush currently reaches an 86% Google AI Overview citation rate in the B2B SaaS audit. Ahrefs reaches 68%, while Moz sits much lower at 32%. Google Analytics, measured separately in website analytics, reaches 89%.

These companies publish far more than ordinary product marketing. Ahrefs routinely releases studies covering millions of AI Overview citations, CTR changes and search results. Semrush publishes large studies from its own keyword database. Both operate free tools and maintain deep educational libraries.

That content can become source material for Google long after the original article was published. A fresh Ahrefs study about AI Overview CTR can be cited directly, then referenced by other publishers, then become supporting material around future searches on the same subject.

SEO SaaS has an obvious advantage when the company owns proprietary data and keeps publishing findings from it. Knowing SEO alone is not enough; having information worth citing is much more useful.

Which CRM and customer-support SaaS are strongest in Google AI Overviews?

HubSpot currently dominates CRM searches in Google AI Overviews, while Zendesk has an even larger lead in customer-support software.

HubSpot appears in around 92% of audited CRM AI Overviews, ahead of Salesforce at 76%, Zoho CRM at 63% and Pipedrive at 53%.

Customer support produces another concentrated result. Zendesk reaches 87%, followed by Freshdesk at 57%. Help Scout reaches around 33%, Zoho Desk 30%, Kustomer 22%, Salesforce Service Cloud 17% and HubSpot Service Hub 15%.

The HubSpot result is especially useful because it shows how category-specific AI visibility can be. HubSpot is extremely strong when Google is discussing CRM software, yet its Service Hub product performs much worse when the question becomes specifically about customer-support platforms.

Google therefore does not appear to give a company one universal authority score and repeat it everywhere. The same domain can dominate one software category and struggle in another.

SaaS category	Current leader	Google AIO rate	Other major products
CRM	HubSpot	92%	Salesforce 76%, Zoho CRM 63%, Pipedrive 53%
Customer support	Zendesk	87%	Freshdesk 57%, Help Scout 33%
Product analytics	Amplitude	93%	Mixpanel 85%, PostHog 66%
Observability	Datadog	83%	New Relic 56%, Dynatrace 46%

Can smaller SaaS companies beat much larger brands in Google AI Overviews?

Yes. Several smaller SaaS companies currently punch far above their overall AI visibility specifically inside Google AI Overviews.

Lovable is a good example. Its overall citation rate across the major AI engines in the notedbyai dataset is 51.3%, while its Google AI Overview rate reaches 77%. Bolt.new shows a similar pattern, at 42.7% overall versus 59% on Google.

GrowthBook is even more interesting. Its blended AI visibility is 45.1%, but Google AI Overviews cite it 74% of the time in the measured category queries. Plausible Analytics reaches 63% on Google despite an overall AI citation rate of only 33.7%.

In Plausible’s case, Google visibility is therefore almost 1.9 times its broader AI visibility.

These companies are useful because they break the assumption that AI Overview visibility simply mirrors brand size. Google can clearly favor a smaller product when its pages, documentation and outside references fit a particular set of queries well.

For a SaaS challenger, Google AI Overviews currently look more penetrable than a universal AI-brand leaderboard would suggest.

Does a SaaS need to rank number one on Google to appear in AI Overviews?

No. Strong Google rankings help, but SaaS companies can now enter AI Overviews through pages that would never have occupied the number-one organic position.

Ahrefs’ latest large study analyzed four million AI Overview URLs and found that 37.9% of cited pages also appeared inside Google’s first ten result blocks for the same query. In other words, most citation URLs did not overlap with those first ten blocks.

Another controlled study of 1,000 software queries reached a related conclusion from a different angle. About 94% of the AI Overviews contained at least one source from Google’s organic top ten, yet only around 30% of all citations were those exact top-ten pages.

Google still leans heavily on websites it already trusts, but the generated answer pulls from a much wider source set.

For SaaS companies, that opens several routes onto the same search page. The company can rank organically, appear as an AI Overview source, get mentioned through a comparison site, surface in Reddit or show up through YouTube.

This partly explains how smaller SaaS companies can compete with larger brands without first beating them for every conventional blue-link ranking.

Does a SaaS need its own website to be cited for AI Overviews to help the brand?

No. A large part of SaaS visibility in AI answers currently comes from other websites talking about the product.

Citera’s study of roughly 350,000 B2B SaaS articles found that 61% of AI citations came from earned media, while brand-owned content accounted for 29%. The first-party share is still substantial for SaaS, but third-party sources remain the majority.

That can include publishers, software comparisons, communities, review websites, partner sites and social platforms.

YouTube has become especially important. Ahrefs’ latest large AI Overview analysis found YouTube was the biggest source of citations among pages that did not rank conventionally, accounting for 18.2% of those non-ranking citations. Reddit also remains heavily represented in AI search research.

For a SaaS company, this creates an indirect acquisition path. A comparison article can introduce HubSpot, a Reddit discussion can recommend Figma, or a YouTube tutorial can demonstrate Datadog. The user may remember the product even when somebody else’s website receives Google’s immediate click.

Measuring only citations to the SaaS company’s own domain therefore misses a large part of how AI Overview discovery currently works.

What SaaS content does Google AI Overview seem to prefer?

Google AI Overviews are much more likely to use SaaS content with real evidence, expert input and specific data than generic SEO articles.

Citera’s 350,000-article study gives us unusually clear numbers. Only 21% of typical B2B SaaS articles contained expert quotes, compared with 52% of AI-cited articles. Just 29% of ordinary articles included at least three statistics, versus 64% among content cited by AI systems.

The average cited article contained 4.2 statistics and 1.6 expert quotes. Non-cited articles averaged only 1.2 statistics and 0.2 quotes.

The difference shows up in the companies already performing well. Datadog has deep technical documentation. HubSpot publishes software research, definitions and comparisons. Figma has extensive documentation and community material. Semrush and Ahrefs constantly publish proprietary datasets.

The stronger pattern is that current AIO visibility favors SaaS companies that give Google something concrete to reuse: a number, an explanation, a technical answer, a comparison or first-hand evidence.

Publishing another generic 2,000-word article around a keyword is becoming a much weaker strategy.

Are Google AI Overviews moving closer to the SaaS purchase decision?

Yes. AI Overviews are moving deeper into commercial SaaS research, while the final transaction still tends to happen outside the generated answer.

Semrush’s recent six-month analysis found that AI Overview appearances on commercial-intent searches increased 71%. At the same time, transactional AI Overview appearances declined around 5%.

That split fits software buying particularly well. Google can answer “best CRM for a ten-person sales team” or compare Salesforce with HubSpot. It cannot finish configuring the CRM, start the trial or migrate the customer’s data.

AI Overviews increasingly sit between problem recognition and the final vendor decision.

For SaaS companies, that stage can be more commercially important than raw informational traffic. Losing a click on “what is product analytics?” may hurt pageviews. Being absent when someone asks “best product analytics platform for a B2B SaaS” can keep the company off the shortlist entirely.

The recent shift toward commercial queries is therefore one of the strongest reasons to take Google AI Overview visibility seriously now.

So which SaaS actually get traffic from Google AI Overviews?

The clearest current Google AI Overview winners are Figma, HubSpot, Amplitude, Outreach, Zendesk, Mixpanel, Datadog, Semrush, Highspot and several technical SaaS brands, but nobody outside those companies can honestly rank them by exact AIO traffic yet.

Recent category-level audits repeatedly put those companies near the top. Figma reaches 100% Google AI Overview visibility in its measured design queries, Outreach 96%, Amplitude 93%, HubSpot 92%, Zendesk 87%, Semrush 86%, Mixpanel 85% and Datadog 83%.

The evidence also tells us what those numbers mean in practice. Seer’s large CTR study shows that being cited can deliver two to five times the organic CTR of appearing on an AIO search without being cited. HubSpot, meanwhile, reports that qualified leads from AI-generated answers increased 1,850% between Q1 2025 and Q1 2026 and converted at up to three times the rate of traditional search leads.

As seen above, those HubSpot figures cover AI search more broadly rather than Google AI Overviews alone. They still give us the strongest public evidence that the type of visibility measured in AIO studies can eventually turn into customers.

A second group deserves attention precisely because the companies are smaller. GrowthBook, Lovable, Plausible Analytics and Bolt.new currently perform much better in Google AI Overviews than their broader AI visibility would predict. Google is clearly leaving room for challengers when they fit the query well.

The answer today is fairly sharp. Google AI Overviews are already sending commercially useful visibility and traffic toward SaaS companies, particularly those that dominate a software category or provide unusually strong source material. Figma, HubSpot, Amplitude, Zendesk, Datadog and Semrush are among the best-supported examples.

What we still cannot produce is an honest table saying Figma gets 50,000 AIO visits, HubSpot gets 40,000 and Amplitude gets 30,000. Google does not expose that data publicly. For now, the strongest defensible answer comes from combining current AIO citation frequency, measured CTR behavior and the smaller amount of company-level acquisition data that is actually available.