AI Overviews Cut Clicks 34%: Search Impact Data

Key Takeaways

• AI Overviews cut the click-through rate for Google’s number one organic result by 34.5% within a year of the US rollout, per Ahrefs’ study of 300,000 keywords
• By December 2025, the same Ahrefs methodology found the drop had grown to 58%
• People click a normal search result only 8% of the time when an AI Overview appears, against 15% without one, according to Pew Research Center
• Clicking a link inside the AI Overview itself happens in just 1% of visits, the same Pew study found
• A randomised field experiment measured a 38% drop in organic clicks on queries that trigger an AI Overview
• Zero-click searches, where nobody clicks any link at all, rose from 54% to 72% once an AI Overview appeared in that same experiment
• AI Overviews reached 24.61% of tracked US Google queries at their July 2025 peak, then settled at 15.69% by November 2025, per Semrush
• Google launched AI Overviews in Australia on 29 October 2024, after local testing from late September

AI Overviews cut the top-ranking Google result’s click-through rate by 34.5%, per Ahrefs’ March 2024-to-2025 study of 300,000 US keywords. Pew Research found clicks drop from 15% to 8% when an AI summary appears (July 2025). No Australia-specific click study exists yet, so these are US-based, industry-wide figures.

AI Overviews cut the top-ranking Google result’s click-through rate by 34.5% within a year of rolling out in the US. Ahrefs measured this across 300,000 keywords, comparing Google Search Console data from before and after the feature launched. That is not a rounding error. It is the gap between a page that gets read and a page that sits at position one and never gets touched. Pew Research reached a similar conclusion from a different angle: people click a normal search result 15% of the time without an AI Overview on the page, and only 8% of the time with one. A newer field experiment goes further, putting the organic click loss at 38% and finding that two out of three AI Overview searches now end with no click anywhere. This post lays out the verified numbers behind each figure, where they came from, and what they mean for a business relying on search traffic in 2026.

The Ahrefs Study Behind the 34% Number

Ahrefs pulled 300,000 keywords from its own database: 150,000 that trigger an AI Overview and 150,000 comparable informational keywords that do not. For each one, researchers Ryan Law and Xibeijia Guan used aggregated Google Search Console data to track the average desktop click-through rate for the page ranking in position one, month by month.

The comparison ran March 2024, before the US rollout, against March 2025, a year after it. Position one’s average CTR across informational keywords fell from 5.6% to 3.1% over that period. Isolating just the keywords that show an AI Overview, the forecasted CTR (what position one would earn without an AI Overview present) was 4.0%, against an actual measured CTR of 2.6%. That gap between forecast and actual is where the 34.5% figure comes from.

Ahrefs re-ran the same analysis in December 2025 and found the gap had widened to 58%. Position one is not just losing clicks. It is losing more of them the longer AI Overviews stay in the results.

Takeaway: a page holding the top spot for an AI Overview query is earning roughly a third fewer clicks than it would have earned a year earlier, and the gap is not closing.

What Pew Research Found When It Watched 68,879 Searches

Ahrefs works from search engine result data. Pew Research took a different approach: it recruited 900 US adults, installed browser tracking with their consent, and logged 68,879 real Google searches in March 2025. Roughly 58% of participants triggered at least one AI Overview during the study.

The result: when an AI Overview appeared, people clicked a traditional blue link 8% of the time. When it did not appear, that figure was 15%, roughly double. Clicking a source link inside the AI Overview itself, rather than a regular result below it, happened in just 1% of visits. Most people read the summary and left.

Google publicly disputed Pew’s methodology, calling the query set unrepresentative of search traffic overall. Ahrefs’ independently sourced 34.5% to 58% figures point in the same direction using a different dataset, which is worth noting when weighing that objection.

Takeaway: whichever study you trust more, the direction agrees. An AI Overview on the page roughly halves the odds that someone clicks through to a website at all.

Zero-Click Search Is Becoming the Norm

A more recent randomised field experiment, run by researchers from the Indian School of Business and Carnegie Mellon University, tested this with an actual controlled trial rather than observed data. Over January and February 2026, 1,065 US Chrome users were split into three groups: one saw Google as normal, one had AI Overviews hidden by a browser extension, and one was redirected into Google’s AI Mode.

AI Overviews appeared on 42% of the queries these participants ran. On those queries, organic clicks fell 38% compared with the group that had AI Overviews hidden. Zero-click searches, meaning the person closed the tab or moved on without clicking any result, rose from 54% in the hidden-AIO control group to 72% when the AI Overview was shown. Outbound clicks per search dropped from 0.61 to 0.38. Removing the AI Overview from the top of the page nearly doubled the number of outbound clicks a search produced.

This was a working paper, posted to SSRN in early 2026 and not yet peer-reviewed. It carries less weight than a published, replicated study, but its randomised design controls for a problem the observational Ahrefs and Pew data cannot: it isolates the AI Overview itself as the cause, not just a correlated pattern.

Takeaway: removing an AI Overview from a search result page, on its own, almost doubles how often someone clicks through to a website.

How Fast AI Overviews Are Spreading

None of this matters if AI Overviews barely show up. They do, and their reach has moved around a lot in a single year. Semrush tracks more than 10 million search queries and found AI Overviews appearing in 6.49% of them in January 2025, rising to 13.14% by March. Coverage kept climbing through the first half of the year, peaking at 24.61% of tracked queries in July 2025, before Google pulled back the feature’s reach to 15.69% by November.

A separate industry tracker from BrightEdge, covering nine commercial verticals, recorded 48% prevalence by March 2026, a 58% year-on-year rise. The gap between Semrush’s 15.69% and BrightEdge’s 48% comes down to methodology: different keyword sets, different device mixes, and commercial queries triggering AI Overviews at different rates than informational ones. In Australia specifically, Google’s own blog confirmed the feature launched on 29 October 2024, following local testing from late September that year. We could not verify a reliable, sourced figure for current AI Overview prevalence on Australian queries specifically, so treat the US-based percentages above as the best available figure rather than an Australian number.

Takeaway: AI Overview coverage is not a fixed number. It moved from roughly 1 in 15 US queries to nearly 1 in 4, then settled back down, and a business’s own traffic data will show more than any single industry-wide figure.

What This Means for Your Search Strategy

Three things follow from the numbers above. First, a top ranking is worth less than it used to be for queries that trigger an AI Overview, so chasing position one on its own is no longer the whole strategy. Second, the loss concentrates on informational queries: 99.2% of keywords that trigger an AI Overview in Ahrefs’ dataset carry informational intent, not commercial or transactional intent. A page built to answer “how does X work” is exposed. A page built to sell or book something usually is not. Third, the only way to know how much of this is happening to a specific site is to check its own Google Search Console data, because industry averages hide enormous variation by topic and query type.

That last point is the practical one. If organic clicks on informational pages have dropped over the past year, Search Console will show exactly which queries and pages lost the most ground, and whether an AI Overview is the likely cause or something else. RockingWeb’s free SEO audit pulls a site’s own Search Console data, checks it against patterns like the ones in this post, and flags which pages are worth fixing first.

Takeaway: the fix starts with a site’s own click data, not an industry average, because AI Overviews hit informational queries hardest and leave transactional ones largely untouched.

The Data at a Glance

None of these studies claim to be the final word. Methodologies differ, sample periods differ, and Google disputes at least one of them directly. What they agree on is the direction: an AI Overview on the results page reduces the odds that a normal search result gets clicked, and that effect has grown rather than shrunk since the US rollout in May 2024. Checking your own numbers beats guessing which industry average applies to your site.

Sources

1. Google (Australia blog) - AI Overviews rolls out Australia wide, 29 October 2024. Checked 10 August 2026.

Last reviewed: 10 August 2026.