AI Overviews Reduce Clicks by 34.5%

ahrefs.blog: “Google says AI Overviews increase clicks. Cold, hard logic disagrees, and so does our research. 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. Thanks to our data scientist, Xibeijia Guan, for pulling the data for this analysis….We selected 300,000 keywords from Ahrefs Keywords Explorer database, consisting of 150,000 keywords with an AI Overview present and 150,000 keywords with informational intent and no AI Overview present. Our research found that 99.2% of keywords that trigger AI Overviews are informational in intent, so we’ve focused on informational keywords for a better like-for-like comparison. We used aggregated GSC data to get each keyword’s average desktop clickthrough rate (CTR) per month (sum of clicks/sum of impressions). We then compared the clickthrough rates for both samples for March 2024 (before the US rollout of AI overviews) and March 2025 (after)…

This isn’t surprising. I have seen anecdata suggesting that some websites have seen clicks reduce by 20–40% since the rollout of AI overviews. It seems possible. AI Overviews function in a similar way to Featured Snippets, by trying to resolve the searcher’s query directly in the SERP—likely contributing to more zero-click searches. And although AI Overviews often contain citation links, there can be many of these links cited, making it less likely for any single link to earn the lion’s share of clicks. It’s also telling that despite Google’s optimistic claim that “links included in AI Overviews get more clicks than if the page had appeared as a traditional web listing for that query”, there is still no way to disambiguate AI Overview clicks and impressions from the rest of your Search Console data. It seems that Google doesn’t want us to see the clickthrough rate for AI Overviews.

See also The Atlantic – no paywall – The End of Publishing as We Know It. Inside Silicon Valley’s assault on the media. “When tech companies first rolled out generative-AI products, some critics immediately feared a media collapse. Every bit of writing, imagery, and video became suspect. But for news publishers and journalists, another calamity was on the horizon. Chatbots have proved adept at keeping users locked into conversations. They do so by answering every question, often through summarizing articles from news publishers. Suddenly, fewer people are traveling outside the generative-AI sites—a development that poses an existential threat to the media, and to the livelihood of journalists everywhere…”