Appearing in an AI Overview: 10 sectors measured

You want your company to appear in the block Google displays above the links. First question, rarely asked: does Google produce one at all, on the searches that concern you?

Since April 2026 we have been asking the same questions every day across ten sectors of the Swiss-French market. 3,407 measurements later, the average is 76.7 %. It says little once you look sector by sector.

First, check whether Google answers in your sector

Swiss Atlas, Repliq observatory, October 2026 edition. Ten Swiss-French verticals, questions asked daily.

More than forty points separate the two ends. Google answers readily on what can be explained: a price, a procedure, an opening time, an insurance cover. It holds back on taste, experience and the high end.

A restaurateur and an online bank are therefore not playing the same game. The first still has about one search in two passing without a generated block, and classic search optimisation keeps its place there. The second is described by Google in more than nine searches out of ten.

The format that works is not the same everywhere

Two formats compete for first place: the editorial article and the product page. In most sectors only a few points separate them, and the order can change from one month to the next. Travel leans clearly towards the product page.

Swiss Atlas, Repliq observatory, October 2026 edition. Ten Swiss-French verticals, questions asked daily.

Restaurants are the only sector where the directory listing comes first, fr.tripadvisor.ch at the top. The editorial article trails far behind. A restaurant investing in a blog is working a format Google rarely retains: its listing, its reviews and its opening hours weigh more.

In telecommunications, the comparison weighs as much as the product page. When the gap between the first two formats is small, the safest course is to work both.

You cannot cite yourself

Across the whole corpus, 97.0 % of the citations in an AI Overview point to a third-party site. By sector, the share going to the company's own site never exceeds eight percent.

Swiss Atlas, Repliq observatory, October 2026 edition. Ten Swiss-French verticals, questions asked daily.

At the other end of the table, in luxury watchmaking, one citation in a thousand points to the brand's own site. All the rest come from resellers, forums, videos and the specialist press.

The gap is not accidental. The sectors at the top of the table publish information nobody else holds: train timetables, product ranges, course programmes. Those at the bottom are described by an ecosystem that gets along without them.

That does not mean your site is useless. It remains what Google reads, it converts, and it keeps its place on “where to buy” questions, where the block almost never appears. But if your goal is the generated answer, the work happens mostly elsewhere: comparison sites, newspapers, trade directories, forums.

How many doors there are to push

The number of sites to work, and their relative weight, change a great deal.

Swiss Atlas, Repliq observatory, October 2026 edition. Ten Swiss-French verticals, questions asked daily.

Two opposite work plans read here. In retail, a few targets weigh heavily: five sites capture a quarter of citations. In travel and tourism, the top five do not even carry a tenth of citations, across more than three hundred sites. There is no main door, the effort spreads.

The sites that matter, sector by sector

Here are the five most cited sites in each sector, excluding general platforms and the measured brands' own sites. This is the starting list for press relations work.

Swiss Atlas, AI Overview citations, April to August 2026.

Three useful observations. Swiss-French comparison sites come first in regulated sectors, insurance and telecoms in particular. Reddit appears in six sectors out of ten, often in the top five, while almost no Swiss SME writes there. And in watchmaking as in restaurants, the selection is made by highly specialised sites, some run by a single person.

These are newsrooms and teams, not forms.

How long before judging

Across the whole corpus, 59.6 % of cited pages are cited on a single day. Here too the sector gap matters.

Swiss Atlas, Repliq observatory, October 2026 edition. Ten Swiss-French verticals, questions asked daily.

In health insurance, one cited page in two returns on the following days. In luxury watchmaking, seven in ten disappear after a day.

The consequence is practical. The more volatile your citations, the more weeks before a gain can be told apart from a fluctuation. A single test says nothing anywhere, and even less in the sectors at the top of this table.

The work plan that follows

Four questions in order, with the answer for your sector in the tables above.

Does Google answer in your sector? If the rate is low, part of your traffic still goes through the classic links, and search optimisation keeps priority there.

Which format is retained? Editorial article or product page almost everywhere, directory listing in restaurants. If the first two are close, work both.

Which sites to target, and how many? A short heavy list in retail, a long flat one in travel.

Over how many weeks to measure? The higher your sector's volatility, the longer the window.

These figures describe one vertical per sector, measured daily. They give orders of magnitude and a method, not the detail of your market. For how the block itself works, see AI Overview and when it triggers. If you hand this work to a provider, the six questions to ask before signing.

Method and limits(5)

1. Corpus. Swiss Atlas, Repliq's observatory across ten sectors of the French-speaking Swiss market, questions asked in French since 20 April 2026.
2. One vertical per sector. Each sector is observed through a real company of the Swiss-French market, tracked daily, with 234 to 240 questions. It serves as a probe and is not named: what we publish is the source landscape around its questions, not an assessment of that company. None is a Repliq client.
3. Trigger. A measurement counts as triggered when the search returns an AI Overview with non-empty text.
4. Volatility. A page counts as cited on a given day if it appears in at least one answer that day. Days are distinct, not consecutive.
5. What these figures do not say. They describe French-speaking Switzerland and do not transpose unchanged.

See the sources cited in French-speaking Switzerland→