The AI Overviews traffic impact is real for most informational pages: when an AI summary appears, fewer people click the regular results. A Pew Research Center study of 900 U.S. adults found they clicked a traditional result on 8% of visits with an AI summary, against 15% without one. Ahrefs measured a 58% lower click-through rate for top-ranking pages on keywords with an AI Overview by December 2025. Google disagrees with the framing. It says total organic clicks have stayed “relatively stable” and that clicks from AI Overview pages are higher quality.
Both things can be true at once. My verdict, in short: expect lower CTR on informational queries, expect the damage to vary a lot by query type, and measure your own site before you believe anyone’s average, including mine.
The Common Mistake: Blaming AI Overviews for Every Traffic Drop
When I get a traffic-drop screenshot from a site owner, it’s usually one line on a chart. Down and to the right. Most site owners compare the wrong things. They look at this year’s total organic traffic against last year’s, see a drop, and blame AI Overviews. That comparison mixes in core updates, lost rankings, seasonality and competitors. It can’t isolate one SERP feature.
What actually decides the answer is narrower. Did your clicks fall on the specific queries that show an AI Overview, while your rankings on those queries held? If yes, the Overview is a likely cause. If your positions dropped too, you have a ranking problem first, and AI Overviews are a side story.
I also see the opposite mistake. Some owners dismiss every study because Google called one of them flawed. That’s not a reason to ignore the data, just a reason to read how each study was built.
What Does Independent Research Say About AI Overviews and Clicks?
Three studies come up again and again. Each measures something different, one with real people’s browsing, one with a huge keyword sample and one with agency client accounts, so I’d read them together rather than quote whichever number sounds scariest in a headline.
Pew Research Center, July 2025. Pew tracked the real browsing of 900 U.S. adults in March 2025 and analyzed 68,879 Google searches. About 18% produced an AI summary. Users clicked a traditional link on 8% of visits with a summary and 15% without one, and they clicked a link inside the summary on just 1% of visits. They also ended their browsing session after 26% of pages with a summary, against 16% without. The full write-up is on Pew’s site.
Ahrefs, February 2026 update. Ahrefs compared 150,000 keywords with an AI Overview and 150,000 informational keywords without one, using aggregated Search Console data. The average desktop CTR for position one on AI Overview keywords fell from 0.073 in December 2023 to 0.016 in December 2025. Ahrefs puts that at 58% lower than expected. Its first version of the study, in April 2025, found 34.5%.
Seer Interactive, April 2026 update. Seer tracked 53 brands, 5.47 million queries and 2.43 billion organic impressions from January 2025 to February 2026. Organic CTR on queries with an AI Overview fell from 3.19% to a floor of 1.31% in December 2025, then recovered to 2.36% in February 2026. Brands cited inside the Overview averaged 2.07% organic CTR on informational queries in 2025, against 0.94% for brands that weren’t cited.
That Seer recovery matters. It’s the first large dataset I’ve seen where the decline turned around, and Seer lists its own caveats, including that one account skewed its “not cited” group.
What Does Google Say About AI Overviews and Traffic?
Google’s position is consistent and worth hearing out. In an August 6, 2025 post, Liz Reid, head of Google Search, wrote that total organic click volume from Search to websites has been “relatively stable year-over-year”. She said Google is sending slightly more quality clicks than a year earlier, defining a quality click as one where the user doesn’t quickly click back.
Google’s AI features documentation makes the same claim in plainer terms. It says clicks from results pages with AI Overviews are higher quality, meaning users are more likely to spend more time on the site. And Reid’s post argues that traffic is shifting toward forums, videos and first-person perspectives, so some sites gain while others lose.
On Pew specifically, Google told reporters the study used “a flawed methodology and skewed queryset”. One objection was that Pew compared users’ March sessions with results its researchers pulled in April.
Here’s my issue with Google’s side. It hasn’t published the numbers behind “relatively stable” or “higher quality”. A stable total can hide big losers, because a publisher doesn’t get paid in aggregate web traffic. It gets paid in its own.
Google’s Position vs Independent Data, Side by Side
| Question | Google says | Independent data says | Who I’d trust here |
|---|---|---|---|
| Do fewer people click when an Overview shows? | Not addressed directly | Yes: Pew 8% vs 15%; Ahrefs 58% lower position-one CTR | Independent data, three methods agree |
| Is total web traffic from Google down? | Relatively stable year-over-year | No public dataset measures all sites | Google, with no way to check it |
| Are the remaining clicks better? | Yes, more time on site | Seer found cited brands get more clicks | Plausible, unverified; test it on your site |
| Is the trend getting worse? | No decline in aggregate | Seer saw CTR recover in early 2026 | Too early to call |
The Verdict
For informational content, AI Overviews reduce clicks, and I’d plan around that. However, if your queries are short, branded or transactional, or your page is cited inside the Overview, the loss is smaller, and you should measure before you change anything.
I don’t think “AI Overviews killed SEO” survives the data, and I don’t think “nothing changed” does either. The studies agree on direction and disagree on size, which is exactly what you’d expect when the effect depends on the query.
So I treat the Ahrefs and Seer numbers as ranges of what’s possible, not forecasts for a given site. A local plumber and a recipe blog aren’t going to see the same effect.
Which Queries Are Least Affected?
Pew’s data gives the clearest clue about where Overviews show up. Just 8% of one- or two-word searches produced an AI summary, compared with 53% of searches with 10 words or more. Questions starting with who, what, when or why triggered a summary 60% of the time.
So long, question-style informational queries carry the most exposure. Short queries, brand names and “near me” searches carry less, going by that pattern. That’s my inference from Pew’s figures, not a separate study, so check it against your own report.
Ahrefs found something similar on its own site. In a small study of its keywords from March to July 2025, the queries that held clicks best included free tools, where the searcher needs to use something, not just read an answer. A summary can’t run a calculator for you.
How Do You Measure AI Overviews Traffic Impact on Your Own Site?
You can’t get a clean answer from one report. Three, though? That gets you close, and it’s the process I use when I review a site’s search data.
- Split your queries into two sets. In the Search Console performance report, filter the queries you know trigger an AI Overview (check them in a private window) and a control set that doesn’t. My Search Console regex guide shows how to filter by pattern, such as question words.
- Compare CTR at stable positions. Look at the same months year over year. If position held and CTR fell only in the Overview set, you’ve found the likely effect.
- Open the Generative AI performance report. Google’s help page says it rolled out to all websites on August 31, 2026. It counts impressions of your links in AI Overviews and AI Mode by page, country, device and date. It has no clicks and no queries, and low-volume sites may see no data.
- Mark events with annotations. Search Console added custom chart annotations in November 2025. Note core updates, site changes and the date an Overview first appeared on a key query.
- Check engagement and conversions in analytics. If Google is right about quality, sessions from organic search should convert at the same or a better rate even as they shrink.
One thing to know about the regular report. AI Overview impressions are counted in the normal Web search type, where the whole Overview takes one position. That’s one reason impressions can rise while clicks don’t, which I unpack in high impressions, low clicks.
What Should You Do About Lost Clicks?
Start with what the Overview can’t replace. Everything else follows.
Get cited, not just ranked. Seer’s cited-versus-not-cited gap is the strongest argument for working on it. Google doesn’t publish how it picks cited pages, so my working rule is simple: answer the question directly and plainly, and make sure Google can index the page normally. If crawl access or rendering is shaky, fix that first with my technical SEO for AI search checklist.
Build brand demand. Branded searches tend to be short, and short queries showed far fewer summaries in Pew’s data. A name people search for directly is the most durable traffic you own. I’d also track whether AI answers mention you at all, which I explain in how to track brand mentions in AI answers.
Shift effort toward pages that do something. Tools, calculators, comparisons with real opinions, local service pages and product pages. Google’s own post says first-person analysis and original perspectives are gaining.
Judge pages by conversions, not raw clicks. A page that lost a third of its visits and kept its leads didn’t lose much. A page that never converted was always vulnerable.
If you’d like help working out where AI answers are costing you, our AI search optimization service starts with exactly this measurement. The free SEO audit is a lighter first step.
When the Answer Flips
- If your traffic is mostly branded or navigational, then AI Overviews are probably not your problem. Look at rankings and demand first.
- If your pages are cited inside the Overview, then you may see more clicks per impression than uncited competitors, going by Seer’s 2025 averages.
- If your rankings dropped at the same time as your clicks, then treat it as a ranking loss. Fixing an AI Overview “problem” won’t recover positions you lost for other reasons.
- If you run a definitions or quick-facts site, then the pessimistic reading applies to you most. That model depended on the click Google now answers itself.
For the strategic side of all this, my GEO vs SEO piece covers how much of AI search is still plain SEO.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do AI Overviews Reduce Clicks?
For most informational queries, yes. Pew found users clicked a traditional result on 8% of visits with an AI summary versus 15% without, and Ahrefs measured a 58% lower position-one CTR on keywords with an Overview. Google says total organic clicks are relatively stable, so the effect depends heavily on the query and the site.
Can I See AI Overview Clicks in Search Console?
Not separately. Clicks from AI Overviews are mixed into the normal Web search type. The Generative AI performance report, available to all sites since August 31, 2026, shows impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode only, with no clicks or query data.
Can I Opt Out of AI Overviews?
Google offers nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet and noindex as controls. They limit what Google can show, but they also limit your regular snippets, so I rarely recommend them. Blocking Googlebot would remove you from Search entirely.
Are AI Overview Clicks Really Higher Quality?
Google says so, defining quality as users spending more time on the site or not quickly clicking back. It hasn’t published the underlying data. The practical test is your own analytics: compare engagement and conversion rates from organic search before and after Overviews appeared on your key queries.
Last updated: September 2026 by Mizanur Rahman
