# Do AI Overviews reduce clicks? Zero-click searches and what our data shows (2026) > AI Overviews cut clicks by about half on the searches they appear on. What Ahrefs, Pew, SparkToro and Seer found, which searches lose most, and what to do. Canonical: https://www.searchmaxxed.com/research/do-ai-overviews-reduce-clicks Last updated: 2026-10-27 RESEARCH SUMMARY AI Overviews cut clicks by about half on the searches they appear on. What Ahrefs, Pew, SparkToro and Seer found, which searches lose most, and what to do. BH Brenden House Founder of Searchmaxxed. We build agentic SEO and GEO workflows that help businesses rank on Google and get named in ChatGPT, then turn that search into more customers and revenue. PUBLISHED 27 OCTOBER 2026 UPDATED 27 OCTOBER 2026 13 MIN READ Yes. When Google shows an AI Overview, fewer people click through to websites: Ahrefs found the top-ranking page's click-through rate falls 58%. Pew found people clicked a result in 8% of visits with an AI summary, against 15% without one. Across all US Google searches, 68.01% ended without a click in early 2026. But the loss isn't even. It lands on informational questions. Commercial and buying searches show AI Overviews far less often, and cited brands get more than twice the clicks of brands left out. I'm Brenden House, and I run Searchmaxxed, an SEO and AI SEO agency. On 27 October 2026 (AEST) I reread every study below at its source and set it beside our own search data. ## In summary - **AI Overviews cut clicks.** Every independent study agrees: Ahrefs puts it at 58% for the number one result, Pew at about half. - **Zero-click searches are now the majority.** 68.01% of US Google searches sent no click in the first four months of 2026. - **The damage depends on the search.** Questions and comparisons trigger AI Overviews most, and searches with buying intent trigger them least. - **Being cited is the new ranking.** Seer found cited brands earn 2.07% click-through on informational searches, against 0.94% for brands not cited. - **Measure enquiries, not sessions.** Clicks from AI answers are fewer and worth more. Pipeline is the number that matters. | Study | What it measured | Finding | | --- | --- | --- | | [Ahrefs](https://ahrefs.com/blog/ai-overviews-reduce-clicks-update/), Feb 2026 | 300,000 keywords, December 2025 desktop CTR | Position one CTR 58% lower with an AI Overview | | [Pew Research Center](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/07/22/google-users-are-less-likely-to-click-on-links-when-an-ai-summary-appears-in-the-results/), Jul 2025 | 68,879 real Google searches by US adults, March 2025 | 8% clicked a result with an AI summary, 15% without | | [SparkToro with Similarweb](https://sparktoro.com/blog/in-2026-less-than-one-third-of-google-searches-still-send-a-click/), 2026 | US Google searches, January to April 2026 | 68.01% ended with no click, up from 60.45% in 2024 | | [Seer Interactive](https://www.seerinteractive.com/insights/aio-impact-on-google-ctr-2026-update), Apr 2026 | 53 brands, January 2025 to February 2026 | Cited brands earn about twice the clicks of uncited ones | | [Google](https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/search/ai-search-driving-more-queries-higher-quality-clicks/), Aug 2025 | Google's own traffic data, not published | Total organic clicks "relatively stable year-over-year" | ## Do AI Overviews reduce clicks to websites? Yes, by roughly half on the searches where they appear. Ahrefs measured a 58% lower click-through rate for the top result, and Pew measured clicks almost halving, from 15% of visits to 8%. Ahrefs compared two sets of keywords. One set of 150,000 now shows an AI Overview; the other 150,000 are informational keywords that don't. In December 2023, before AI Overviews, position one on the first set earned a 7.3% click-through rate; by December 2025 it earned 1.6%. Some of that fall happened everywhere, so Ahrefs adjusted for it. The overview itself accounts for about 58%. Lower positions lose less, because they had fewer clicks to lose: | Position | Click-through rate change with an AI Overview | | --- | --- | | 1 | -58.0% | | 2 | -50.8% | | 3 | -46.4% | | 5 | -32.6% | | 10 | -19.4% | *Source: Ahrefs, "Update: AI Overviews Reduce Clicks by 58%", 4 February 2026.* Pew looked at behaviour instead of keywords. It tracked what 900 US adults did after searching in March 2025: people clicked a link inside the AI summary on just 1% of visits. They also ended their browsing session entirely on 26% of pages with a summary, against 16% without one. So, do AI Overviews reduce traffic? On informational searches, clearly yes. Whether they reduce *your* traffic depends on which searches your traffic comes from. That's the part most articles skip. ## What is a zero-click search? A zero-click search is a Google search that ends without the person clicking through to any website. They got the answer on the results page, refined the search, or left. AI Overviews are the newest cause, not the first. The usual suspects: - **AI Overview:** an AI-written answer at the top of Google, citing a few sources as links. - **AI Mode:** Google's chat-style search tab. It answers in conversation and links less often. - **Featured snippet:** a block of text lifted from one page and shown above the results. - **Knowledge panel:** the fact box about a company, person or place. - **People also ask:** expandable questions, short answers. - **Local pack:** the map with three businesses, phone numbers and reviews. - **Instant answers:** weather, conversions, sports scores, definitions. Click-through rate (CTR) is the share of people who see your result and click it, and impressions are the number of times it's shown. Zero-click search pushes impressions up. CTR goes down at the same time. ### How many searches are now zero click? 68.01% of US Google searches ended without a click in the first four months of 2026, on SparkToro's analysis of Similarweb's panel. In 2024 the figure was 60.45%, and SparkToro calls that the fastest rise in a decade. I couldn't find a published zero-click rate for Australia. SparkToro has since released figures for the UK, Canada and parts of Europe. Not for Australia. Treat the US number as a guide for Australian search, not a measurement of it. ## Which searches lose the most clicks to AI Overviews? Questions, comparisons and research searches lose the most, because they trigger AI Overviews most, while searches with clear buying intent rarely show one. For an enterprise or B2B company, that split decides how worried you should be. Seer Interactive tracked how often each kind of search showed an AI Overview: | Search type | Shows an AI Overview | | --- | --- | | Comparison ("X vs Y") | 95.4% | | Review searches | 86.3% | | Questions (what, why, how, is, are) | 85.9% | | Price, cost or buy | 83.4% | | "Best" lists | 81.3% | | Informational intent overall | 36% | | Commercial intent overall | 8% | | Transactional intent overall | 5% | *Source: Seer Interactive, "AIO Impact on Google CTR: 2026 Update", 24 April 2026; 53 brands, 49,358 tracked queries.* Our own Australian checks agree. "GEO is a blue ocean" is wrong. In our 13 October keyword capture, Australian AI-topic keywords had a median difficulty of 55, against 29 for everything else, and 82% already showed an AI Overview. 27 of 32 Australian SEO searches we checked showed an AI Overview. Add "agency" and a city and it collapses: 2 of 8. Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Gold Coast, Adelaide and Canberra showed none. Local agency searches are still a ten-blue-links fight. Put those together. One topic can sit on both sides. "What is SOC 2 compliance" will almost certainly get an overview, while "SOC 2 compliance software for fintech" is a buyer shortlisting vendors. There, the odds drop sharply. For a B2B SaaS company, the blog loses clicks first; the product, solution and comparison pages carry the pipeline and lose far less. ## Does being cited in an AI Overview bring clicks back? Partly. Seer found brands cited inside the overview earn 120% more organic clicks per impression than brands that aren't. That's still 38% below a search with no overview at all. | Informational searches, 2025 average | Organic CTR | Paid CTR | | --- | --- | --- | | No AI Overview | 3.35% | 19.75% | | AI Overview, your brand cited | 2.07% | 15.74% | | AI Overview, your brand not cited | 0.94% | 11.19% | *Source: Seer Interactive, 24 April 2026.* Here's what that means for a real budget: say a B2B SaaS company gets 100,000 impressions a month on informational searches. With no overview, Seer's rate gives about 3,350 clicks. Overviews arrive. If the brand is cited, it keeps about 2,070; if it isn't, it drops to about 940. Those are example figures. Put in your own impressions. Cited versus not cited is a gap of 1,130 clicks a month on that example, and AI search work is trying to close it. You can't stop Google showing the overview, but you can affect whether your company is in it. Seer also saw the floor lift in early 2026. Organic CTR on searches with an AI Overview rose from 1.3% in December 2025 to 2.4% in February 2026. One good quarter isn't a trend, though. Seer says so itself. ## Why does Google say traffic is stable? Google says total clicks to websites are steady and that clicks from AI results are worth more. Both statements can be true. Your own traffic can still fall. On 6 August 2025, Google's head of Search, Liz Reid, wrote: "total organic click volume from Google Search to websites has been relatively stable year-over-year". She added that Google is "sending slightly more quality clicks", meaning visits where people don't quickly bounce back. Google published no numbers behind it. Its Search Central guide says clicks from AI Overview pages "are higher quality (meaning, users are more likely to spend more time on the site)." The same post concedes the catch. Traffic is shifting "to different sites", and people increasingly click forums, videos and first-hand perspectives. Steady totals across the whole web can still mean fewer clicks for a company blog that answers simple questions. My reading for a growth team: plan for fewer visits on informational content, and expect the visits that do arrive to be further along. Then judge search on enquiries and pipeline, which is where a quality click should show up anyway. ## How do you tell if AI Overviews are cutting your traffic? Look in Google Search Console for pages where impressions held or rose while clicks fell, then check whether those searches show an AI Overview. Search Console's Generative AI performance report, live for every site since 31 August 2026, shows your AI Overview and AI Mode impressions by page. Work through this: 1. Open Search Console's Performance report and compare the last three months with the same three months last year. 2. Sort pages by lost clicks. Note the ones whose impressions held or grew. 3. Pull the top queries for those pages and search them yourself, recording whether an AI Overview appears and who it cites. 4. Split the queries by intent: informational, commercial, branded. 5. Check enquiries from organic search in your CRM, not just sessions. CTR on its own can mislead you. Seer saw cited brands' impressions more than double in one month, from 15.8 million to 33.1 million. Clicks barely moved, from 398,798 to 400,271. CTR halved. Nothing bad happened; they simply appeared in more overviews. Check the AI traffic itself, too. Here's what we found on an enterprise B2B client's account: A client's GA4 showed AI-assistant visits jump from 354 to 6,050 in a month. Almost none of it was real. About 5,700 came in three one-hour bursts: same 1920x1080 desktop Chrome, all new users, no referrer, about 20 seconds each, landing on two pages. Real AI traffic was 385 sessions against 354 the month before, roughly flat. And check your conversions count at all: A client's four enquiry types never counted as conversions. Their event names ran 41 to 50 characters; GA4 cuts at 40. The 40-character "career" event counted every time. Nobody had noticed, because the events still showed up. When clicks fall, the visits you keep carry more weight, and a broken event hides exactly the leads you're trying to protect. If you'd rather track AI answers with software, our guide to [AI visibility tools](https://www.searchmaxxed.com/research/ai-visibility-tools) compares the options. ## What should enterprise and B2B teams do about zero-click searches? Protect the pages that drive pipeline, get your company cited in the answers you can't avoid, and report on enquiries rather than raw traffic. Here's how that works, part by part. | What to do | Why it works | What Searchmaxxed does | | --- | --- | --- | | Map your searches by intent | Commercial searches rarely show AI Overviews | We split your Search Console queries by intent before choosing work | | Build pages for buying searches | Product, comparison and industry pages keep their clicks | Comparison, industry and integration pages, shipped as page releases | | Answer the question first, in plain facts | AI Overviews lift short, clear answers | Answer-first copy, matching schema, FAQs | | Earn mentions on sites AI answers cite | Citations follow outside sources that agree with you | Digital PR and link campaigns in our plans | | Track who gets named | You can't fix what you don't check | AI answer tracking across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and AI Overviews | | Report pipeline, not sessions | Fewer clicks can still mean more revenue | Search Console and GA4 wired and checked; a monthly decision memo | ### Get named in ChatGPT, not just Google AI Overviews aren't the only zero-click answer your buyers read: ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity answer the same questions and name a few companies. Our own panel showed how selective that is: We put 300 Australian agency-buyer questions to ChatGPT three times each, with search on. It pulled 17,870 search results into those 900 answers and kept 4,389 as sources. Being found is the easy part. About three in four results it reads never make the answer. Ranking puts you in the pool. Plain facts on your pages, and other sites that agree with them, decide whether you're the name it keeps. We wrote up the method in [how to rank in ChatGPT](https://www.searchmaxxed.com/research/how-to-rank-in-chatgpt). Google's own chat tab works on similar lines; see [Google AI Mode SEO](https://www.searchmaxxed.com/research/google-ai-mode-seo). ## Is SEO dead now with AI? No. AI Overviews and ChatGPT both build their answers from pages that rank and sources that agree. SEO now earns two results: clicks from buyers ready to act, and a place in the answer for everyone else. What has changed is the scorecard. Traffic from simple questions is shrinking, and that's not coming back. Rankings for commercial searches, citations in AI answers and the enquiries both produce are where the value is. I go further in [is SEO dead?](https://www.searchmaxxed.com/research/is-seo-dead) ## How does Searchmaxxed handle AI Overviews and zero-click search? Searchmaxxed is an SEO and AI SEO agency for enterprise, B2B SaaS, venture-backed, manufacturing and public-sector companies. We do technical SEO, content, link building, digital PR, GEO, AEO and LLM SEO. The aim: rank in Google and get named in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews for the searches that bring pipeline. Our [AI search optimisation service](https://www.searchmaxxed.com/services/ai-search-optimization) covers the work in detail. The plans differ in volume: page releases each month, and how much work we do on other sites for you. | Plan | Who it suits | What it includes | | --- | --- | --- | | Growth System | A company growing in one or two markets | 30 page releases a month, work on up to 4 existing pages, one qualified link action a month, AI visibility tracking | | Agentic Search Engineering | A crowded, national or category-leading market | 50 page releases a month, comparison, industry and integration pages, digital PR and link campaigns, AI answer tracking across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and AI Overviews | | Custom & Enterprise | Several brands, markets or a very large site | Multiple markets, dedicated engineering, custom reporting and original first-party research | Here's how we do it. We build on a website you own, our Agentic Website. AI agents pull your Search Console and GA4 data, read the live Google results and record which AI Overviews appear and who they cite. That feeds the Managed Search Loop. It shows which page, fix or link should bring in the most enquiries next. We build it. Then we check the live page and measure what changed. Off your site, the Off-Page Source Layer builds the links, digital PR and mentions AI answers draw on. Searchmaxxed's work has generated more than A$10 million in revenue through search for its clients. ## Is Searchmaxxed right for you? We suit marketing and growth teams at enterprise, B2B SaaS, venture-backed, manufacturing and public-sector companies that want the pages built and shipped. You want Google and AI answers handled by one team. If you only want a report on your AI visibility, a tool will cost you less. | Searchmaxxed is a good fit if | Look elsewhere if | | --- | --- | | Your organic clicks are falling and you need pages that win buying searches | Your traffic is mostly news or simple questions you can't turn into pipeline | | You want to be cited in AI Overviews and named in ChatGPT | You only want to monitor AI mentions, not change anything | | You want SEO and AI search from one team, counted in page releases | You need one fix, not ongoing work | | You want to own your site, repository, content and data | You can't give anyone access to change your website | | You want direct access to the people doing the work | You need search alone to fill this quarter's pipeline | ## Frequently asked questions ### Do AI Overviews reduce website traffic? Yes, on the searches where they appear. Ahrefs found a 58% lower click-through rate for the top result in December 2025. Informational pages lose the most. Commercial and buying searches show overviews far less often, so pipeline pages are hit less. ### How many Google searches end without a click? 68.01% of US Google searches ended without a click in January to April 2026, according to SparkToro using Similarweb data. That's up from 60.45% in 2024. No equivalent Australian figure has been published that I could find. ### Can you opt out of AI Overviews? Only by limiting your snippets. Google's guide says `nosnippet` and related controls limit what's shown from your pages. They also cut your normal search snippet, so for most companies being cited beats opting out. ### Does ranking first still matter with AI Overviews? Yes. Position one still earns the most clicks, even after Ahrefs' 58% fall. Ranking also puts your page in the pool Google and ChatGPT draw on, which is where citations come from. ### How do I get cited in an AI Overview? Rank well for the question, answer it plainly in the first lines, and back your facts with structured data and outside sources that agree. Google says AI features need no special markup beyond normal SEO. ### Are clicks from AI Overviews worth more? Google says they are: people spend more time on the site. Google hasn't published the data. Check it in your own analytics by comparing conversion rates from organic visits over time. ### Does AI Mode cause more zero-click searches than AI Overviews? Likely, because AI Mode answers in a conversation and shows fewer links. Search Console's Generative AI performance report shows impressions in both, so you can watch them on your own pages. ## What should you do next? Pull your last 12 months from Search Console and find the pages where impressions held and clicks fell. Search their top queries. Note who the AI Overview cites. If those searches carry pipeline, we'd like to help you win them back. [Let's talk pricing](https://www.searchmaxxed.com/contact). REFERENCES 1. [Ahrefs](https://ahrefs.com/blog/ai-overviews-reduce-clicks-update/) 2. [Pew Research Center](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/07/22/google-users-are-less-likely-to-click-on-links-when-an-ai-summary-appears-in-the-results/) 3. [SparkToro with Similarweb](https://sparktoro.com/blog/in-2026-less-than-one-third-of-google-searches-still-send-a-click/) 4. [Seer Interactive](https://www.seerinteractive.com/insights/aio-impact-on-google-ctr-2026-update) 5. [Google](https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/search/ai-search-driving-more-queries-higher-quality-clicks/) [Get an AI visibility audit](https://www.searchmaxxed.com/contact) See where buyers find someone else across Google and AI answers. See where you are invisible → ## Let's make you the answer. ## Related - [Research](https://www.searchmaxxed.com/research) - [Searchmaxxed](https://www.searchmaxxed.com/)