There can be no doubt that the advent of Google’s AI overviews (AIOs) has had a fairly dramatic impact on the SEO landscape.
If you are a digital marketer, you will have seen some fairly alarming statistics about the drop in organic clicks from Google’s results pages and I can say, from personal experience across a large number of sites, that it has been fairly painful over the past eighteen months or so.
Is it really the SEO apocalypse or is it more nuanced than that?
The headline numbers
AI Overviews now appear on AI Overviews now appear on roughly 48% of tracked queries, up from 31% a year earlier. That is a significant increase and shows the pace at which AIOs are growing.
The effect on clicks has been real, though the exact figure depends on whose study you read. Ahrefs data from December 2025 put the drop in click-through rate for the top-ranking result at 58% when an AI Overview is present, continuing a trend from a 34.5% drop measured back in April 2025.
I cannot personally recall seeing study that rejects this trend and have also seen marked drops in organic search traffic across GA4 accounts that I have access to but it is important to recognise that there is quite a range, in terms of impact, according to keyword set, device, and ranking position.
It is not ALL bad news
Whilst nobody likes to see dropping traffic, it is important to recognise that AIOs can help drive traffic to a website.
A study from Seer Interactive tracked 53 brands across 5.47 million queries and found that CTR on AI Overview queries bottomed out at 1.3% in December 2025 before climbing to 2.4% by February 2026, an 85% jump in two months.
The big takeaway in that study was that you need citations if you want to attract clicks, with brands cited in the AIOs earning approximately 120% more organic clicks per impression than uncited brands answering the same queries
Where do citations actually come from?
If getting cited is now the objective, it’s worth knowing where Google is pulling from. YouTube accounts for around 23.3% of all AI Overview citations, followed by Wikipedia at 18.4% and Google.com itself at roughly 16.4%, based on an analysis of 46 million citations.
That’s a genuinely surprising stat for me, as I would have assumed a well-optimised blog post was the natural citation source. Video and reference-style content are punching well above their weight.
Lower clicks doesn’t automatically mean a worse outcome
It’s tempting to treat every AI Overview appearance as a straightforward loss when compared to a page ranking well in the SERPs. I don’t think that is quite right.
For many websites, being referenced without a click still delivers value through increased brand recognition and perceived authority, and Google continues to favour pages that demonstrate real depth on a subject rather than isolated, thin content.
As the Seer Interactive data shows, lower CTR doesn’t always mean worse results; in some cases, clicks have stayed flat while impressions grew.
I have also found a lot of evidence in my personal GA4 travels of gloomy looking organic search traffic stories that are totally undone by extremely positive conversion stories. In most cases, the lost organic traffic is typically the (very) top of funnel traffic that rarely converts.
That is not to say that top of funnel traffic is bad – it can be very good for brand awareness and I would still much rather have it than not, but the actual commercial impact of the AIO invasion is normally fairly minimal in the accounts that I have looked at.
In a nutshell, we need to rethink what metrics we look at. Visibility and raw CTR alone are now an incomplete picture of visibility.
What should you actually do about it?
Chase the citation, not just the ranking.
Position one on the page means far less than it used to if you’re not the one being quoted inside the AI Overview itself.
You should structure content so the answer is genuinely liftable: a direct, self-contained response near the top of the page, in plain language, backed by a specific fact or figure.
Publish things Wikipedia and YouTube can’t.
Original data, first-hand case studies, and specific numbers from your own work are harder to create than a summary of what everyone else has already said. Try to create something unique rather than run a lazy prompt in ChatGPT…
Given how concentrated citations are around reference and video content, a generic explainer competing head-on with Wikipedia is a losing bet.
Don’t abandon the “considered click” queries.
With CTR rising on searches that don’t trigger an AI Overview, informational queries aren’t the only ones worth writing for.
Comparison content, in-depth guides, and anything a reader genuinely wants to sit with and explore is becoming relatively more valuable, not less.
Reset expectations on what “success” looks like.
A page that’s frequently cited but rarely clicked isn’t necessarily underperforming.
It may be doing exactly what it should at the awareness end of the funnel. Being clear about that distinction now saves a difficult conversation with the bean counters in the future.
Conclusion – more of the same?
AI Overviews have genuinely changed how we think about SEO and the value of a first page ranking. But it is not all bad news.
CTR is recovering off its floor, citations are redistributing value rather than just removing it, and the content that wins is shifting towards genuinely original material over generic explainers.
Yet again, the recommendation is to think about what your target audience wants and to craft genuinely brilliant content that satisfies their appetite for information. In that sense, not much has *really* changed if you are, like us, believers in ‘good’ SEO rather than lazy SEO.
I know that it is not really used these days, but I have always liked the concept of ‘inbound marketing’. You should always strive to earn the attention of your target audience and great content remains the best way of doing this.
It is also one of the best ways to secure citations and therefore undo some of the damage that AIOs have done to organic search traffic.