AI Overviews Are Cutting Organic CTR: What the Data Shows
The click-through rate impact of Google AI Overviews has been debated since their rollout. By late 2025 and early 2026, enough rigorous data had accumulated to move beyond anecdote.
The CTR picture
Seer Interactive’s September 2025 analysis covered 3,119 informational queries across 42 organisations, spanning 25.1 million organic impressions and 1.1 million paid impressions from June 2024 to September 2025. The findings were significant:
- Organic CTR on queries with AI Overviews fell 61% over the period, dropping from 1.41% to 0.64%.
- Paid CTR on those same queries fell 68%.
- Even on queries without AI Overviews, organic CTR fell 41%, suggesting broader behavioural shifts rather than AI Overviews being the sole cause.
A separate randomised field experiment reported by Search Engine Journal found a 38% reduction in organic clicks on queries where AI Overviews appeared, with zero-click searches rising from 54% to 72% on those queries.
The citation finding
The more strategically important result from Seer’s research concerns AI Overview citations. Brands cited within an AI Overview earned 35% more organic clicks and 91% more paid clicks than brands not cited.
This creates an inverted dynamic. The presence of an AI Overview suppresses overall CTR on a query. But a site cited within that AI Overview, drawing users deeper into a topic, receives substantially more clicks than a site that merely holds a top organic ranking.
A further data point reinforces why citation is worth targeting: around 60% of AI Overview citations come from URLs not ranking in the top 20 organic results. Ranking highly does not reliably predict citation, and citation does not require high rankings.
Scale of AI Overview coverage
By February 2026, AI Overviews appeared on approximately 48% of tracked queries, a 58% year-on-year increase. Growth has been fastest in real estate, restaurants, and retail verticals. Health queries see AI Overviews on more than half of monitored searches.
Coverage is lowest in e-commerce and transactional categories, where AI Overviews remain relatively rare and traditional organic results continue to drive most clicks.
Signs of stabilisation
After bottoming out at a measured CTR of around 1.3% on AI Overview-present queries in December 2025, data from early 2026 shows partial recovery. By February 2026, CTR on those queries had risen to approximately 2.4%, an 85% jump from the December low, though still well below pre-AI Overview baselines.
This may reflect users learning to engage differently with AI Overview results, or Google refining which queries receive AI Overviews as it narrows deployment to queries where the format is genuinely useful.
What this means in practice
For most publishers, the short-term effect of AI Overviews is real but not catastrophic: informational query traffic is under sustained pressure, while transactional and navigational traffic remains largely intact.
The medium-term strategic implication is clearer. Ranking is no longer sufficient as a goal. The question is whether your content can be cited as a source within an AI Overview, which means writing content that is specific, factual, and structured in ways that make individual claims extractable. Comprehensive coverage of a topic is less useful than being the clearest source for a specific sub-question within it.
Building direct audience relationships through email, community, and owned channels has become a genuine hedge rather than a theoretical one.