Google Pushes Every Website Listing Off the First Screen on 40.2% of Phone Searches

A homeowner searches "water heater repair" on a phone. The screen fills with a map and three local businesses. To reach the first regular website listing, the one an SEO campaign works to put at #1, the homeowner has to scroll past the map, the business cards and the "more places" button.

That matters because what a searcher sees without scrolling gets most of the attention. If the first website listing is off-screen, ranking #1 in the regular results no longer means being the first thing people see. Something else, placed by Google, takes that spot.

On 40.2% of phone searches, the first website listing starts below the first screen. The biggest cause is not AI. When Google's map of local businesses opens the page, the first website listing is off-screen 99.8% of the time, while pages with an AI Overview push it off-screen less often than pages without one.

On September 23, 2026 we searched 9,990 keywords on Google as an Android phone in the US and recorded the exact position of every element on each results page. For each page we found the first organic result, the first regular website listing that is not an ad, a map entry or a Google feature, and measured how many pixels from the top of the page it starts.

The fold is the bottom edge of the first screen. We set it at 640 pixels, a common phone screen height: if the first website listing starts below 640 pixels, the searcher cannot see it without scrolling. We also recorded which element comes first on each page. The local pack is Google's map with a short list of nearby businesses. A knowledge panel is a box of facts about a brand, place or topic. A product carousel is a scrolling row of products with prices. An answer box is a quoted excerpt that answers the question directly.

The median first website listing starts 514 pixels down, just inside the fold, so on a typical search it is visible, but only barely. The spread has a long tail. On a quarter of searches the first website listing starts below 1,128 pixels, almost two screens down, and on 3.2% it starts below 1,920 pixels, three full screens down.

For a searcher, a listing two screens down is a listing competing with everything above it for a thumb that may never scroll that far. For a business, it means the position in the regular results says less about visibility on a phone than it does on a computer.

What comes first on the page decides where the first website listing lands. When the local pack opens the page, as it did on 1,901 searches, the first website listing is off-screen 99.8% of the time, with a median start of 1,128 pixels. A knowledge panel pushes it off-screen 96.2% of the time and a product carousel every time.

When an AI Overview opens the page, the first website listing is off-screen 36.2% of the time, with a median start of 514 pixels: it pushes results down, but often not past the fold. When a website listing comes first, it is almost always on-screen, at a median of 156 pixels. On local searches, the map is the page, and the regular results start where most searchers have already made their choice.

60.4% of the phone results pages include an AI Overview somewhere on the page. On those pages, the first website listing is off-screen 31.2% of the time. On pages without an AI Overview, it is off-screen 53.9% of the time, a far higher rate.

The local pack explains the difference. 72.7% of pages without an AI Overview show a local pack, against 22% of pages with one. Google tends to answer information searches with an AI Overview and local searches with a map, and the map takes far more of the screen. AI Overviews get the attention, but for businesses that serve customers nearby, the map is what hides the website listings.

For local searches, your Google Business Profile is your first impression. When the map opens the page, the regular results are almost always below the fold on a phone, so the profile, its reviews, photos and hours, does the work a #1 website ranking does on a computer. Keep it complete and current before spending more on website rankings for local terms.

For information searches, the AI Overview is the likeliest thing at the top of the screen. Being cited inside it is how you are seen without a scroll, so write pages that answer the question in their first lines, with specific figures and steps Google's AI can quote.

Finally, check your important keywords on a phone, not a computer, and note what fills the first screen for each. An ai seo company such as Suff Digital tracks what fills the first screen for your keywords, from AI Overviews to the map, and where you appear in each.

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