Google's AI Overviews appeared for 39.1% of election-related searches in an AlgorithmWatch study, well below the 65.3% rate for nonpolitical queries. The advocacy group used researcher access under the EU Digital Services Act to run 4,480 searches tied to three 2026 elections in eastern Germany.
Coverage varied without a clear public rule. Queries about the far-right AfD produced summaries 24% of the time, versus 45% to 58% for other parties. Nearly half of cited links came from ten domains, with Google's YouTube appearing most often. Six media sites accounted for 75% of links to news outlets, while party websites appeared without labels distinguishing them from neutral sources.
The group also found positive descriptors distributed unevenly across parties. In one Saxony-Anhalt sample, 81.5% of CDU summaries were rated clearly positive, compared with 50% for the SPD, 10.7% for the Greens and none for the AfD. Clear factual errors were rare. Google said the feature is designed to be neutral and appears only when useful, but did not explain the observed selection patterns.