AI search
What AI Overviews did to your traffic
Two thirds of Google searches now end without a click. The numbers are worse than most businesses realise, and the response that works is narrower than the panic suggests.
7 min read
If organic traffic fell over the past two years while rankings held, nothing is broken on your site. The results page changed underneath you.
68%
Of US Google searches that end without a click, early 2026
58%
Drop in click-through rate for the top result when an AI Overview appears
8% vs 15%
Share of visits producing a click, with an AI Overview versus without
Zero-click searches were around 60% two years ago. They are now roughly 68%. AI Overviews appear on more than a fifth of searches, and where they appear the top organic result loses well over half its clicks.
The number that actually matters
The headline decline is not the useful figure, because you cannot opt out of it. This is the useful one: when an AI Overview appears, what happens to a page depends on whether the Overview names it.
- Cited in the Overview — around 2.1% CTR
- Named as a source. Still below what the same position used to earn, but roughly double the alternative.
- Not cited, same results page — around 0.9% CTR
- Present, ranked, and effectively invisible. This is where most pages now sit.
- No AI Overview at all — around 3.3% CTR
- The old baseline, and the honest comparison. Nothing available today gets you back to it.
Being cited roughly doubles what you get. It does not restore what you had. Both facts matter, and most coverage reports only one of them.
It is not uniformly bad
Two pieces of context stop this from being a catastrophe narrative. First, the click-through rate on AI Overviews themselves bottomed out around 1.3% at the end of 2025 and recovered to roughly 2.4% by February 2026 — people are learning to click the citations. Second, the damage is concentrated in a specific kind of query.
Informational questions with a short factual answer are the ones being absorbed. Opening hours, definitions, quick comparisons — these were never good traffic anyway. Queries where someone is choosing a supplier, comparing real options, or about to spend money still produce clicks, because a paragraph does not settle them.
What to do about it
- 01
Stop measuring impressions as if they were reach
Impressions have never been less connected to visits. Track the queries that produce enquiries and revenue, and let the rest go.
- 02
Work out which of your traffic was already worthless
Much of what AI Overviews absorbed was people getting a fact and leaving. Losing it looks alarming in a chart and costs nothing.
- 03
Aim for the citation, not the ranking
Since being named roughly doubles the click rate, the target changes from position one to being the source the summary quotes.
- 04
Move weight to queries a paragraph cannot answer
Comparison, suitability, price context, local specifics, anything requiring a decision. These are also the queries worth having.
- 05
Reduce the dependency
Direct bookings, email, returning customers, referrals. A business whose demand rests entirely on one results page has a structural problem that predates AI.
Recovering visibility in this environment is what the growth work is for.
How Grow worksFollow-up
Questions this raises.
- Can I opt out of AI Overviews?
- Not selectively. Blocking the crawlers that feed them also removes you from the search results that still send clicks, which trades a partial loss for a total one. The workable response is to aim at being the source the summary cites.
- How do I know whether I am being cited?
- Search the questions your customers actually ask and read what comes back, across more than one assistant and more than one phrasing. Automated tracking exists but is young; for most businesses, checking a short list of real queries by hand is more reliable and costs nothing.
- Why did my impressions rise while clicks fell?
- Because an impression now frequently means your page informed an answer that nobody clicked. Impressions have never been less connected to visits, which is why they are a poor measure of reach in this environment.
- Which queries still send traffic?
- The ones a paragraph cannot settle: comparisons, suitability, local specifics, and anything where someone is about to spend money. Short factual questions are the ones being absorbed, and they converted poorly anyway.