AI Summary
AI Overviews reduce position-1 click-through rates by 58%, according to Ahrefs’ February 2026 re-run of their 300,000-keyword CTR study using December 2025 data. That number has nearly doubled from the 34.5% reduction Ahrefs measured in their April 2025 study using the same methodology. The CTR damage is accelerating, and it hits informational queries first.
This post is the data foundation that several other posts on this site reference. It covers the CTR evidence stack in full, explains why the studies show different numbers, identifies which query types are insulated, and connects the measurement to the zero-click strategy response. Every number here traces to its primary source.
The two Ahrefs studies: what they measured and why the numbers differ
Ahrefs has run this analysis twice using the same methodology. The gap between 34.5% and 58% reflects the same measurement approach applied to two different time windows as AI Overview coverage expanded.
April 2025 study: 34.5% CTR reduction
Ahrefs selected 300,000 keywords from their Keywords Explorer database: 150,000 with an AI Overview present and 150,000 informational keywords without one. They used aggregated Google Search Console data to get each keyword’s average desktop CTR per month (sum of clicks divided by sum of impressions). Comparing March 2024 (pre-AI Overviews in the US) against March 2025 (post-rollout), they found the forecasted CTR for AI Overview keywords, had AI Overviews not rolled out, would have been 0.040. The actual CTR was 0.026. The formula: (0.026 minus 0.040) divided by 0.040 equals negative 34.5%. Ahrefs’ conclusion: “We analyzed 300,000 keywords and found that the presence of an AI Overview in the search results correlated with a 34.5% lower average clickthrough rate (CTR) for the top-ranking page, compared to similar informational keywords without an AI Overview.”
February 2026 update: 58% CTR reduction
Ahrefs re-ran the same study in February 2026 using December 2025 data. Same 300,000-keyword sample, same methodology, two-year gap (December 2023 to December 2025) instead of one year because December 2024 is post-AI Overviews rollout and cannot serve as a clean baseline. Forecasted CTR: 0.037. Actual CTR: 0.016. Result: 58% lower CTR. Ahrefs stated: “We found that the presence of an AI Overview now correlates with a 58% lower average clickthrough rate for the top-ranking page.” The gap between 34.5% and 58% reflects 20 months of additional AI Overview rollout, expanded geographic coverage, and the law of shitty clickthroughs: users habituating to AI summaries and clicking through less as novelty wears off.
The 55.8 million AIO prevalence study
A separate Ahrefs study published May 2025 analyzed 55.8 million AI Overviews across 590 million searches. Key findings: AI Overviews appear for 9.46% of all keywords on desktop, and for 16% of all US keywords. By search volume, they cover at least 12.8% of all Google searches. Informational queries account for 97.70% of all keywords triggering AI Overviews. The study confirmed that AI Overviews appear more on longer queries and higher-volume keywords, and less on branded, local, and transactional queries.
Pew Research: behavioral click data
Pew Research published a July 2025 analysis using web browsing data from 900 US adults who agreed to share their browsing activity. Their dataset covered 68,879 unique Google searches in March 2025. The finding: “Users who encountered an AI summary clicked on a traditional search result link in 8% of all visits. Those who did not encounter an AI summary clicked on a search result nearly twice as often (15% of visits).” That 8-versus-15 ratio represents roughly a 47% reduction in click likelihood for pages not cited in the AI summary. Separately, Pew found that users “very rarely clicked on the sources cited” in the AI summary itself, with that behavior occurring in just 1% of visits to AI summary pages.
The Pew and Ahrefs numbers measure different things. Ahrefs measures CTR for the top-ranking page across keyword samples. Pew measures the actual click behavior of real users across all searches including those that do not involve top-ranking pages. Both directionally confirm the same finding: AI Overview presence suppresses outbound clicks significantly. The AI Mode optimization playbook on this site cites the Pew figure as “roughly 47% CTR decline for non-cited pages,” which is a valid reading of the 8-versus-15 comparison.
What the CTR data actually measures
All three datasets measure the organic page CTR suppression effect of AI Overview presence on the SERP. None of them directly measures whether the cited sources inside AI Overviews gain or lose traffic. That is a different question.
The Seer Interactive measurement (referenced in the zero-click recovery guide) tracked organic CTR for informational queries from June 2024 to September 2025. Seer found organic CTR for AI Overview queries falling from 1.76% to 0.61% over that window, a 61% decline. Critically, citation changes the picture within that displaced pool: Seer measured a 35% higher organic CTR when a brand is cited in the AI Overview versus not cited (0.70% versus 0.52% on Q3 2025 averages). Citation does not restore the old pre-AI click volume, but a cited source consistently out-earns an uncited one on the same query. That asymmetry is why the response to CTR data is citation strategy, not rank defense.
Who loses most: informational queries
The Ahrefs 55.8 million AIO study quantifies the distribution precisely. 97.70% of AI Overview-triggering keywords are informational in intent. Branded queries, local queries, and transactional queries are all underrepresented. This means the bulk of CTR damage falls on mid-to-long-tail informational research queries: exactly the queries that drove organic traffic for B2B SaaS, healthcare, legal, and educational content sites.
Informational queries are also the queries where content investment has historically been highest. Companies that built large pillar and cluster architectures to capture informational search are disproportionately exposed. The Bain December 2024 survey (n=1,117) found that roughly 60% of searches now end without a click and organic traffic is down an estimated 15-25%. That aggregate figure is dominated by informational displacement.
Who is insulated: branded, transactional, local
The 55.8 million AIO study shows that branded queries appear in AI Overviews at a lower rate than their share of overall search. Local queries are similarly underrepresented. Transactional queries (buy, pricing, demo) account for only 2.85% of AI Overview-triggering keywords even though transactional intent is a significant share of overall search.
Three query categories remain structurally resistant to AI Overview CTR suppression:
- Brand queries where users are searching for your company, product, or founder by name. AI engines consistently cite the primary brand source. CTR for branded navigational queries is not suppressed by AI Overviews at the same rate as informational queries.
- Transactional queries with purchase intent. “Buy X,” “X pricing,” and “X demo” queries rarely trigger AI Overviews and route users to product pages or comparison tools. The 2.85% transactional share of AI Overview triggers confirms this.
- Local queries with geographic specificity. “Best X in [city]” and “X near me” queries are underrepresented in AI Overviews. Local Google Business Profile optimization remains a lower-displacement traffic channel.
The zero-click strategy response
The CTR data makes the strategic imperative clear. Ranking at position 1 for an AI Overview query without being cited in the AI Overview now means earning roughly 42% of what that ranking used to deliver (58% suppression means you keep 42 of every 100 historical clicks). For position 2 through 10, the suppression ranges from 50.8% to 19.4% based on Ahrefs’ February 2026 position-level breakdown.
The Bain zero-click pool data establishes the strategic context: 80% of consumers rely on zero-click results in at least 40% of their searches. Organic traffic is estimated down 15-25% across the web. The response is to become a cited source inside the AI Overview, which converts ranking authority into citation authority.
The full recovery framework is in the zero-click recovery SEO guide. The short version: segment keywords by displacement type, restructure content for citation eligibility using passage-level atomic sentences, build original data assets that AI must cite, and fortify brand query territory where displacement is lowest.
AI Overviews vs AI Mode: different CTR dynamics
AI Overviews are the inline summary boxes in standard SERP results. AI Mode is Google’s full conversational interface. They share Gemini’s underlying RAG architecture but serve different use cases. The CTR suppression studies above measure AI Overviews specifically. AI Mode operates on an opt-in or routing basis and has different CTR dynamics, but the citation principle carries across both surfaces: being cited inside the answer is what earns the click. Seer Interactive’s data on AI Overviews shows cited sources earning a 35% higher organic CTR than uncited ones on the same queries, and the same citation-over-ranking logic applies in the conversational interface. The AI Mode optimization playbook covers the conversational side. This post covers the inline AI Overview CTR story.
The relationship between featured snippets and AI Overviews is also relevant to the CTR picture. Ahrefs tracked 1,000,000 US desktop SERPs from January to June 2025 and found featured snippets declined 64% as AI Overviews grew 598% over that period, with a -0.90 correlation between the two trends. AI Overview prevalence reached 27.43% of SERPs by June 2025. The featured snippets vs AI Overviews post covers that displacement story in full. The Ahrefs February 2026 study finding of 58% lower CTR for AI Overview keywords is the updated version of what that earlier snippet-displacement data was signaling directionally.
Measuring AI Overview CTR impact on your own site
The aggregate studies show the industry average. Your site-specific exposure depends on how much of your keyword portfolio triggers AI Overviews. The measurement uses GSC: filter for queries where impressions held flat or grew but clicks fell by 20% or more, then verify which of those queries actually show an AI Overview. Queries with an AI Overview and no citation to your domain represent maximum displacement. The AI search traffic dashboard in Looker Studio provides a free template for continuous monitoring. Our GEO/AEO Tracker handles the citation side across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews.
The CTR data in the context of GEO optimization
The CTR suppression numbers explain why GEO optimization differs from traditional SEO in strategic priority. Standard SEO maximizes ranking position. GEO optimization maximizes citation presence, because citation presence determines whether a ranking translates to traffic in an AI Overview environment.
Our May 2026 study of 153,425 citations found that 74.9% of cited sentences appear in the first half of the source document, with mean cited position at 37% through the document. Cited sentences average 9.27 words, and the 6-10 word range accounts for 45.2% of all citations. These structural patterns are the content-side response to the CTR data: matching how AI Overview RAG systems retrieve passages is what converts ranking authority into citation authority.
For additional context on the Google AI Overviews optimization playbook, the AI Overviews CTR organic traffic impact post, and how to track citation velocity as the leading indicator of recovery, the citation velocity measurement framework provides the instrumentation layer. The AI search analytics metrics guide covers which numbers to track once the measurement stack is in place.