Research · 5 September 2026
What Google's first page looks like when you search for a tool.
4,123 first pages for tool searches, read for the boxes Google puts around the results, and 12,512 read for who the results are. An AI Overview sits on 42% of them. YouTube is on 30%. More than a third have no major brand on them at all.
A typical tool search, top to bottom
YouTube appears on 30% of first pages, Google Play on 18%, Reddit on 18%, Adobe on 13%, Wikipedia on 12%. An app store listing is on 19% of pages.
What I read
I build small tools that work in the browser, and before I build one I buy the first page of Google for the search it would have to rank for. The vendor returns two things about each page: the results, in order, and the boxes Google added around them, the AI Overview, the People also ask list, a video row, an image strip. That gave me two views of the same pages: what Google puts on them, and who Google puts on them.
For 4,123 first pages I have the boxes. For 12,512 I have the results, each site counted once per page and marked as a major brand or not: Adobe, Canva, YouTube, Google Play, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Wikipedia, the big file converters, and so on. All of it was gathered in the first week of September 2026.
The boxes
Almost every tool search now gets a People also ask list. Two in five get an AI Overview, which sits above the first result. Video rows appear on a quarter.
Table view
| Box | Share of first pages |
|---|---|
| People also ask | 91.6% |
| AI Overview | 42.1% |
| Videos | 22.6% |
| Images | 11.7% |
| Perspectives | 5.5% |
| Short videos | 3.2% |
| Knowledge panel | 2.3% |
| Currency box | 0.5% |
Where the AI Overview shows up
Not evenly. It is on 28% of calculator searches and 24% of converter searches, the two jobs with a definite numeric answer, and on 53% of developer-utility searches. It is also more common where big brands already hold the page: 62% of locked first pages carry one, against 40% of open ones, 22 points apart. And it is rarest on the biggest searches: 33% of pages for searches over 100,000 a month, against 47% under 5,000.
Table view
| Category | Pages | AI Overview | People also ask | Videos |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Other | 1,678 | 61% | 95% | 35% |
| Calculators | 1,650 | 28% | 88% | 6% |
| Converters | 512 | 24% | 97% | 43% |
| Tests and checkers | 198 | 46% | 83% | 6% |
| Developer utilities | 66 | 53% | 89% | 20% |
| Generators | 10 | 10% | 70% | 0% |
| Timers and clocks | 9 | 33% | 67% | 0% |
Who is on the page
An average first page holds 7.8 ordinary results. 18% of those slots belong to a major brand, and they are not spread evenly: 37% of first pages have no major brand on them at all, while 20% have three or more.
Table view
| Major brands on the page | First pages | Share |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | 4,629 | 37% |
| 1 | 3,382 | 27% |
| 2 | 2,033 | 16% |
| 3 | 1,023 | 8% |
| 4 | 662 | 5% |
| 5 | 432 | 3% |
| 6+ | 351 | 3% |
| Site | First pages | Share |
|---|---|---|
| youtube.com | 3,746 | 29.9% |
| calculator.net | 2,791 | 22.3% |
| play.google.com | 2,299 | 18.4% |
| reddit.com | 2,216 | 17.7% |
| calculatorsoup.com | 1,591 | 12.7% |
| en.wikipedia.org | 1,487 | 11.9% |
| adobe.com | 1,426 | 11.4% |
| canva.com | 1,417 | 11.3% |
| omnicalculator.com | 1,159 | 9.3% |
| facebook.com | 726 | 5.8% |
| timeanddate.com | 664 | 5.3% |
| rapidtables.com | 605 | 4.8% |
| bankrate.com | 583 | 4.7% |
| freeconvert.com | 581 | 4.6% |
| pinterest.com | 541 | 4.3% |
| Major brand | Share of first pages |
|---|---|
| YouTube | 29.9% |
| Google Play | 18.4% |
| 17.7% | |
| Adobe | 12.7% |
| Wikipedia | 12.0% |
| Canva | 11.3% |
| Microsoft | 6.2% |
| Amazon | 3.6% |
| Apple App Store | 3.0% |
| Chrome Web Store | 2.6% |
YouTube is the single most common site on a tool search, on 30% of first pages, ahead of every tool site: the most common of those, calculator.net, is on 22%. An app store listing, Google Play or Apple, sits on 19%. Reddit is on 18%, Wikipedia on 12%. Adobe and Canva, the two companies that have built the most web tools, are on 13% and 11%.
Limits
- One snapshot, the first week of September 2026, as served to the vendor's US desktop crawler. Pages move, and the AI Overview in particular appears and disappears.
- The boxes are as the vendor labels them. “Major brand” is my list; move the line and the shares move.
- The pool is queries with tool intent, gathered while choosing what to build. It is not a sample of all search.
- Each site is counted once per page, so a site with two results on one page counts once.
The data
Every share on this page is in one file, the same file the page is rendered from. It holds no query at all: category names, box names, brand names and shares.
Download the data as JSON