Google AI Overviews: Why You're Losing Up to 61% of Your Clicks

Two independent studies just put a number on something many companies were already seeing in their traffic: Google’s AI Overviews — the AI-generated summaries that sit above classic search results — cut organic CTR by up to 61% on informational queries, and by 58% according to Ahrefs’ latest update. At Evicron, an AI and custom software studio based in Barcelona, we see this daily in the visibility audits we run for clients: the question is no longer whether AI Overviews affect your traffic, but by how much, and what to do about it.

Ahrefs’ number: from 34.5% to 58% in under a year

In April 2025, Ahrefs analyzed 300,000 keywords and found that the presence of an AI Overview cut the top-ranking result’s CTR by 34.5%. They re-ran the same methodology with December 2025 data — 150,000 keywords with an AI Overview present versus 150,000 informational keywords without one — and the drop had grown to 58%. This isn’t a one-off snapshot: it’s a trend that keeps worsening month over month as Google rolls AI Overviews out to more languages, countries, and query types.

Seer Interactive: CTR drops even where there’s no AI summary

The second study, from agency Seer Interactive and reported by Search Engine Land, analyzed 3,119 informational queries across 42 organizations — 25.1 million organic impressions and 1.1 million paid, from June 2024 to September 2025 — and reaches an even more uncomfortable conclusion: organic CTR falls 61% on queries with an AI Overview, paid CTR falls 68%, but organic CTR also drops on queries without an AI Overview — by 41%. People, overall, are clicking less on any result, AI summary or not. The one number that rewards the effort: brands that get cited inside the AI Overview earn 35% more organic clicks and 91% more paid clicks than brands that don’t appear cited at all.

Why this is accelerating right now

It’s no coincidence the drop is speeding up in 2026: Google has already rolled out its third spam update of the year, starting August 18, the same week it expanded AI Overview coverage to more query types. The more searches that get answered directly on the results page, the fewer reasons a user has to click any link at all, yours or a competitor’s. For a company that depends on people actually reaching its website — a services SME, an online shop, a consultancy — this isn’t a technical SEO footnote. It’s a shift in where the business comes from.

What this means if you’re not a media publisher

The instinctive reaction is to assume this only hits newspapers and ad-funded blogs. It doesn’t. If your company wins customers through informational content — “how to choose X,” “what is Y,” comparisons, guides — exactly the kind of query that triggers the most AI Overviews, a 41-61% CTR drop on those pages is a direct hit to your leads, even if your rankings haven’t moved a single position. Tracking rank alone is no longer enough: you need to track how many of those potential clicks are staying inside the search engine itself.

What to change, given this data

1. Stop optimizing only for position — start measuring citation. A page ranking #1 that never appears inside the AI Overview loses to a page ranking #3 that does get cited. Check Search Console for whether your pages are mentioned inside the summaries, not just whether they rank.
2. Prioritize content a generative engine can cite without ambiguity: concrete claims, sourced data, clear H2/H3 structure — the same criterion we covered when we looked at how to check whether ChatGPT and Google already cite you.
3. Don’t rely on a single acquisition channel. If 40-60% of informational traffic is staying inside Google, everything else in the funnel — email, referrals, your own brand, community — carries more weight than it did a year ago.
4. Focus on what actually moves visibility, not symbolic gestures like publishing an llms.txt that almost nobody ever reads: real external authority and technical accessibility for AI crawlers.

How we handle this at Evicron

In our web development and AI SEO projects, we now track citation inside AI Overviews and ChatGPT or Gemini answers as its own metric, separate from classic ranking, because Ahrefs’ and Seer’s data shows these are two different games that no longer get won with the same tactics. We audit what share of your target queries trigger an AI Overview, whether you’re cited in them, and what’s missing for you to be.

Want to know how much traffic you’re already losing to AI Overviews, and what to do about it? Get in touch: we start with a real visibility audit, not generic promises of “AI ranking.”