Google Won't Show an AI Overview for 'Best X in Delhi'. Here's What It Will.

There’s a lot of advice going around about optimising for Google’s AI Overviews. Most of it skips the first question: does an AI Overview even appear for the searches you care about?

In Delhi, for the commercial queries most businesses chase, the answer is no.

We ran a paired-query test on 26 July 2026 — the same category asked two ways, once commercially and once as advice. The split was clean: three out of three commercial queries produced no AI Overview at all. Three out of three advice-framed queries on those same categories produced one.

That’s not a rounding error. It’s a rule you can plan around.

The test

Rather than surveying many categories shallowly, we paired them. For each category, one query phrased the way a business wants to rank (“best interior designers in Delhi”) and one phrased the way a customer actually starts (“how much does interior design cost in Delhi”). Searches were run on google.com with region set to India, no personalisation.

The result

Six queries, three categories, a perfectly clean split.

Why Google does this

On the commercial searches, Google isn’t showing nothing — it’s showing something it considers better. For “best dental clinic in Delhi for implants” we got the local pack: DR Bhutani Dental (4.9, 911 reviews), Green Park Dental (4.9, 2.9K reviews), Delhi Dental Cosmetics (4.9, 854 reviews), followed by Practo, hospital pages, individual clinic sites and a Reddit thread from r/delhi.

That’s a query with clear local intent and high commercial value. Google already has a well-tuned answer — the map pack — and an AI summary would displace it, along with the ads that sit alongside. So the AI Overview stays out.

Advice queries are different. “How to choose a CBSE school in Delhi” has no single business as the answer. It needs synthesis across sources. That’s precisely what an AI Overview is for.

The practical translation: in Delhi’s competitive commercial categories, you cannot win an AI Overview for your money keyword, because there isn’t one to win. You can win the question your customer asks before they get to that keyword.

One detail worth noticing

In the Delhi dental local pack, Google annotated two of the three listings with a line we don’t see often:

“Their website mentions best dental clinic”

Google is telling searchers, in the local pack, that it found the phrase on the business’s website. Your site content is being used to justify your map placement — visibly, in the results. The website isn’t irrelevant to local ranking; it’s feeding it, just not through an AI Overview.

This is a Delhi finding, not a law of nature

We checked the same query shape in another city. “Best dental clinic in Kochi for implants” did return an AI Overview — citing FMS Dental and Scientific Dental from their own websites.

Same query structure. Same industry. Opposite outcome.

The difference is competition. Kochi’s dental market is thin enough that Google is comfortable summarising it. Delhi’s is dense, high-value and heavily monetised, so Google defers to the local pack. AI Overview presence tracks how contested a market is — which means the more competitive your city, the less likely AI Overviews are to be your route in, and the more the fundamentals still decide it.

It also means you cannot copy an AI-search strategy from a smaller market into Delhi and expect it to transfer.

What to actually do in Delhi

Stop optimising for AI Overviews on your money keywords. For “best [service] in Delhi”, there is no AI Overview. Effort spent there is spent on something that doesn’t exist. Those searches are won in the local pack — profile completeness, review count and recency, proximity, category accuracy.

Build content for the advice questions instead. “How to choose”, “how much does it cost”, “what should I ask before hiring”, “what’s the difference between X and Y”. These reliably trigger AI Overviews in Delhi, they sit earlier in the buying journey, and almost nobody is competing for them because they don’t look like money keywords. They are the entry point.

Answer them properly. Direct answers near the top, clear question-led headings, specific figures rather than “it depends”, and genuine expertise. AI Overviews are assembled from sources that answer cleanly.

Run the test yourself before committing budget. Search your commercial term and your advice term. Note which returns an AI Overview. It takes five minutes and tells you where the opportunity actually is in your category — which may not match ours.

Why we published this

We’re a Mumbai-based agency and we work with Delhi NCR clients remotely. We have no office there and we don’t claim one.

What we do have is a view that Delhi gets sold a lot of AI-search services that assume AI Overviews are everywhere. In the categories we tested, for the queries businesses actually want, they weren’t there at all. Knowing that before you spend is worth more than another checklist.

Our method is simple enough that you can verify or contradict it in an afternoon. If you get different results, we’d like to know — that’s how this should work.

Want your Delhi category mapped properly? Book a free audit and we’ll test your commercial and advice queries and show you where the gap is.

We ran different tests in two other cities, with different engines and very different findings: what AI recommends in Kochi and what ChatGPT recommends in Mumbai.