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July 11, 2026|5 min read

# Google's AI Overviews Cut Clicks 61%- Then Clicks Came Back

A story of Zero click search or how to get cited in AI Overviews- AI Overviews cut organic CTR up to 61% in 2025 — then rebounded 85% by 2026. What the data, lawsuits, and real case studies actually show.

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# AI Overviews Cut Organic CTR by Up to 61% — Then Started Recovering in 2026

**TL;DR:** Independent studies from [Ahrefs](https://ahrefs.com/blog/ai-overviews-reduce-clicks/), [Seer Interactive](https://www.seerinteractive.com/insights/aio-impact-on-google-ctr-september-2025-update), and the Pew Research Center all found the same thing in 2025: when Google shows an AI Overview, click-through to the top organic result drops somewhere between 34% and 61%, depending on methodology. Real businesses felt this directly — HubSpot's blog traffic collapsed by roughly 70–80%, and Chegg sued Google over it. But the story didn't stop at "SEO is dying." Seer Interactive's most recent data (through February 2026) shows organic CTR on AI-Overview queries partially rebounding — up 85% off its December 2025 floor — as no-AIO queries pick up more of the click volume instead. The practical takeaway: stop treating clicks as the only KPI, and start treating citation _inside_ the AI Overview as its own optimization target, since cited pages get meaningfully more clicks than non-cited ones on the same query.

## The Core Finding: Every Major Study Agrees on Direction, Not Magnitude

**Google AI Overviews** — the AI-generated summaries that appear above the traditional "ten blue links" on Google Search — have been live in the US since May 2024 and now reach an estimated 2 billion-plus searchers a month. Three independent research teams, using three different methodologies, converged on the same conclusion about what that does to click behavior: AI Overviews suppress clicks to the organic results below them. The disagreement between studies is only ever about _how much_, never about _which direction_.

-   [**Ahrefs**](https://ahrefs.com/blog/ai-overviews-reduce-clicks/), the SEO tool company, compared 300,000 keywords — half that triggered an AI Overview, half that didn't — using aggregated Google Search Console data. Their first pass, comparing March 2024 to March 2025, found a **34.5% drop** in position-1 CTR when an AI Overview was present, with the average top-ranking CTR for informational keywords falling from roughly 0.056% to 0.031% over that year. Ahrefs' Director of Content Marketing, Ryan Law, and data scientist Xibeijia Guan re-ran the analysis using December 2025 data and found the gap had widened to a [**58% reduction**](https://ahrefs.com/blog/ai-overviews-reduce-clicks-update/) — nearly double the original figure in eight months.
    
-   [**Seer Interactive**](https://www.seerinteractive.com/insights/aio-impact-on-google-ctr-september-2025-update), a performance marketing agency, tracked 3,119 informational queries across 42 client organizations from June 2024 through September 2025, covering 25.1 million organic and 1.1 million paid impressions. Organic CTR for queries with AI Overviews fell from 1.76% to 0.61% — a 61% decline — while paid CTR on those same queries dropped 68%, from 19.7% to 6.34%. Perhaps more striking: even queries that never triggered an AI Overview saw organic CTR fall 41% year over year, suggesting the shift in user behavior extends beyond the pages where AI summaries physically appear.
    
-   **The Pew Research Center**, a nonpartisan research organization better known for its polling than its SEO commentary, took a different approach entirely: rather than aggregating keyword-level search-console data, it tracked actual browsing behavior for a representative panel of US adults. Users clicked a traditional search result roughly half as often when an AI summary was present versus when it wasn't — and a meaningful share of users ended their browsing session entirely after seeing the summary, rather than clicking anything at all. Google publicly disputed Pew's methodology, but Pew's behavioral-tracking approach — watching what people actually did, rather than inferring it from aggregate click logs — is one reason researchers treat it as an important cross-check on the Ahrefs and Seer figures.
    

None of these three organizations shared data or coordinated before publishing, and none used the same measurement window or dataset. That independence is exactly what makes the _direction_ of the finding credible even though the exact percentage swings by 20-plus points depending on whose numbers you cite.

## Real-World Casualties: What This Looked Like for Actual Companies

Aggregate percentages are easy to skim past. The businesses on the losing end of this shift did not experience it as an abstraction.

### HubSpot: A 70–80% Blog Traffic Collapse, in Public

**HubSpot**, the CRM and marketing software company, is the most-cited casualty of the AI Overview era, largely because its CEO addressed it directly. Analysis using Similarweb and Semrush data showed HubSpot's blog organic traffic falling from roughly 13.5 million monthly visits in early 2023 to somewhere between 2 and 7 million by early-to-mid 2025 — a 70–80% collapse — even as the company's overall business kept growing through direct, branded, and paid channels. On a 2025 earnings call, CEO Yamini Rangan told analysts plainly that organic search traffic was "declining globally" and that AI Overviews were "giving answers, and fewer people are clicking through to websites."

What makes HubSpot's case instructive rather than just alarming is what the company did next. By its Q4 2025 earnings call, HubSpot was publicly reframing the loss: leadership pointed to 68% growth in YouTube-sourced leads, 53% growth in newsletter leads, and a deliberate pivot toward **Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)** — optimizing content specifically to be cited inside AI-generated answers rather than clicked from a traditional results page. HubSpot's own case study of one customer, the learning platform Docebo, describes a similar pivot: as organic traffic declined, Docebo shifted budget and content strategy toward AEO rather than doubling down on traditional blog SEO. The lesson HubSpot draws from its own experience is not "content marketing stopped working" — it's "content marketing's distribution channel changed, and the KPI has to change with it."

### Chegg v. Google: When CTR Loss Becomes a Lawsuit

**Chegg**, the online education and textbook-rental company, took the more adversarial route. In February 2025, Chegg filed a federal antitrust lawsuit against Google and its parent Alphabet, alleging that AI Overviews unlawfully leverage Google's dominant position in search to keep users inside Google's own ecosystem rather than sending them to Chegg's site. In its earnings disclosure around the same time, Chegg reported that non-subscriber traffic had fallen to roughly **negative 49%** year-over-year in January 2025 — a sharp acceleration from an 8% decline reported just two quarters earlier — alongside a 24% year-over-year revenue decline. CEO Nathan Schultz told investors Google was "reaping the financial benefits of Chegg's content without having to spend a dime," and the company simultaneously announced it was exploring a sale or take-private transaction with Goldman Sachs as its advisor.

Chegg's case is a useful boundary marker: it illustrates what happens to a business model built almost entirely around being the destination for a specific, easily-summarized type of query (step-by-step problem solutions) when an AI Overview can generate the same answer inline. **Penske Media Corporation**, publisher of Rolling Stone and The Hollywood Reporter, filed a similar suit in September 2025, arguing AI Overviews "illegally regurgitate content" from its sites while sitting permanently above the links to the original source — a claim Google has called "meritless," noting that AI Overviews "send traffic to a greater diversity of sites."

### The Quieter Story: Brands That Get Cited Without Getting Clicked

Not every outcome in this dataset is a casualty story. **Zillow**, the real estate listings site, offers a more nuanced example: research analyzing millions of AI-generated responses and citations found that Zillow's brand is mentioned constantly by AI systems answering residential real-estate questions — functioning as the AI's default authority on the category — even in cases where Zillow's own domain isn't the one directly linked as a citation. In other words, Zillow's decade of building topical authority and structured, entity-rich real-estate data appears to have made it the default "ground truth" that AI models reach for, whether or not that translates into a click every time.

That distinction — being the entity an AI model _trusts_ versus being the specific URL it _links_ — is becoming its own strategic target. Brands increasingly use structured comparison content (well-documented "best of" or category-listicle formats, backed by real methodology and external validation) specifically to build that kind of entity recognition, since research from Seer Interactive's Q1 2026 tracking found listicle-format content accounts for roughly half of the content types cited across AI search platforms.

## But Wait: Google Says Everything Is Fine

**Sundar Pichai**, CEO of **Alphabet** (Google's parent company), told investors on a Q4 2025 earnings call that AI Overviews "continue to perform very well" and are "driving greater usage," while Alphabet's overall revenue exceeded $400 billion for the first time and search ad revenue grew 17%. How does that square with the CTR collapse documented above? Three mechanisms explain most of the gap:

1.  **CPC inflation is compensating for fewer clicks.** WordStream's 2025 benchmarks showed average Google Ads cost-per-click rising to $5.26, up 12.9% year-over-year, with the software/tech vertical seeing a 41% jump. Fewer clicks at meaningfully higher prices can net out to flat or growing ad revenue for Google even as individual advertisers see worse CTR.
    
2.  **Google monetizes the AI Overview surface directly.** Ads began appearing inside AI-Overview-containing search results pages at a rapidly growing rate through 2025 — a new inventory surface that didn't exist before AI Overviews launched.
    
3.  **Google captures value inside its own ecosystem even without a click.** When a user gets a satisfactory answer without leaving Google, that user stays on Google's properties longer, sees more ad impressions elsewhere in the session, and generates more first-party behavioral data — value that hasn't disappeared so much as it's been redistributed away from the publisher that originally produced the underlying information.
    

## The Part Most 2025 Coverage Missed: CTR Is Recovering

Here's where this stops being a simple "SEO is dying" narrative. Seer Interactive kept running its tracking study into 2026, and the most recent release tells a materially different story than the one most publications quoted in early 2026.

Organic CTR on AI-Overview-present queries climbed off a floor of 1.3% in December 2025 to **2.4% by February 2026** — an 85% jump in two months, according to [Seer Interactive's 2026 update](https://www.seerinteractive.com/insights/aio-impact-on-google-ctr-2026-update), which expanded its tracking to 53 brands, 5.47 million queries, and 2.43 billion impressions. At the same time, CTR on queries _without_ an AI Overview also rose, from 2.8% in early 2025 to 3.8% by February 2026, according to [Search Engine Land's coverage](https://searchengineland.com/google-ai-overviews-ctr-recovery-study-475566) of the same data.

Seer's own research team offers two explanations for the rebound:

1.  **AI Overviews are absorbing the low-intent traffic they were always going to absorb.** Users doing a quick lookup no longer click anywhere — but the users who _do_ still click through are higher-intent by definition, once the "just curious" segment has stopped clicking at all. That can push measured CTR back up even without any change in Google's underlying behavior.
    
2.  **The no-AIO query pool is becoming more valuable inventory, not less.** Content teams that identify which of their target queries reliably avoid triggering an AI Overview are, in effect, finding a growing pocket of traffic that behaves like pre-2024 search — informational, no-AIO organic CTR reportedly improved from roughly 2.93% to 3.97% across nearly a billion impressions tracked in 2025.
    

This matters for anyone reading a 2025-vintage "AI Overviews are killing search" article today: the underlying study it cites has already been updated, and the picture is less one-directional than it looked six months ago.

## Where the Damage Concentrates

Not every query type is affected equally. **Amsive**'s analysis of 700,000 keywords across 10 websites and 5 industries breaks this out clearly:

Query type CTR impact Non-branded informational ~-20% Ranking outside top 3 ~-27% AI Overview + Featured Snippet both present ~-37% **Branded queries** **+18.68%**

That last row is the one worth sitting with. When someone searches your brand name specifically, an AI Overview appearing alongside it doesn't cost you the click — it appears to reinforce it. That single data point underlies a lot of the current "invest in brand" advice circulating in performance-marketing circles: branded search is, at the moment, the one category of query where AI Overviews and organic CTR move in the same direction.

## What This Means If You're Optimizing Content for AI Search

For teams building GEO/AEO strategy — which is squarely **Topicker** territory — four things fall out of this data directly:

1.  **Citation inside the AI Overview is a distinct, measurable optimization target.** Across every dataset above, cited pages consistently earn meaningfully higher CTR than non-cited pages on the very same query. That gap is large enough to justify treating "get cited" as its own goal, separate from and sometimes more valuable than traditional ranking position.
    
2.  **Structure and freshness beat schema markup as a citation lever.** Broader 2026 GEO research has found JSON-LD schema's direct effect on AI citation probability to be small on its own — worth implementing for entity clarity and knowledge-graph purposes, but not the primary lever. Clear, self-contained sections that can be lifted as a standalone passage, and content updated recently enough to read as current, matter more.
    
3.  **Track CTR by AI-Overview status, not in aggregate.** A single blended CTR number across all your tracked queries will hide the fact that your no-AIO queries may be improving while your AIO queries decline, or vice versa — precisely the split Seer's own tracking surfaces at scale.
    
4.  **Brand and entity investment pays a structural dividend now.** Since branded queries are the one segment where AI Overviews correlate with a CTR _increase_, and since entities like Zillow get recognized by AI systems even without a direct click, building durable topical and brand authority is no longer just a demand-generation tactic — it's a defensive one against AI-mediated zero-click search.
    

## FAQ

**Do AI Overviews really reduce organic click-through rate?** Yes. Ahrefs, Seer Interactive, and the Pew Research Center each found organic CTR fell somewhere between 34% and 61% on queries where an AI Overview appeared, using three different, independently-run methodologies.

**Is the CTR decline permanent?** Not necessarily. Seer Interactive's 2026 data shows organic CTR on AI-Overview queries climbing 85% off its December 2025 floor by February 2026, alongside a similar rise on non-AIO queries.

**What's the single best defense against AI Overview CTR loss?** Getting cited inside the AI Overview itself. Cited pages consistently out-click non-cited pages on the same query by a wide margin, across every study that measured it — and building broader entity recognition, as Zillow has in real estate, can earn AI trust even without a direct citation link.

**Do branded searches suffer the same CTR loss?** No — branded queries are the one category where AI Overviews correlate with a CTR _increase_ rather than a decrease, likely because they reinforce rather than replace an already-formed user intent.

**Have any real companies sued Google over AI Overviews?** Yes. Chegg filed a federal antitrust suit against Google and Alphabet in February 2025 over lost traffic and revenue, and Penske Media Corporation (Rolling Stone, The Hollywood Reporter) filed a similar suit in September 2025.

* * *

### Sources

-   [Seer Interactive — AIO Impact on Google CTR: September 2025 Update](https://www.seerinteractive.com/insights/aio-impact-on-google-ctr-september-2025-update)
    
-   [Seer Interactive — AIO Impact on Google CTR: 2026 Update](https://www.seerinteractive.com/insights/aio-impact-on-google-ctr-2026-update)
    
-   [Search Engine Land — Google AI Overviews CTR shows early signs of recovery](https://searchengineland.com/google-ai-overviews-ctr-recovery-study-475566)
    
-   [Ahrefs — AI Overviews Reduce Clicks by 34.5%](https://ahrefs.com/blog/ai-overviews-reduce-clicks/)
    
-   [Ahrefs — Update: AI Overviews Reduce Clicks by 58%](https://ahrefs.com/blog/ai-overviews-reduce-clicks-update/)
    
-   [Search Engine Land — Ahrefs & Amsive data on AI Overviews and CTR](https://searchengineland.com/google-ai-overviews-hurt-click-through-rates-454428)
    
-   [CNBC — Chegg sues Google for hurting traffic with AI](https://www.cnbc.com/2025/02/24/chegg-sues-google-for-hurting-traffic-as-it-considers-alternatives.html)
    
-   [Wikipedia — AI Overviews (background and litigation timeline)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_Overviews)


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