How Google AI Overviews Are Reducing Organic Click-Through Rates

This insight comes from analyses conducted by SEO tool provider Ahrefs and performance agency Amsive.

By the numbers: How AI Overviews affect CTR for organic listings:

• Ahrefs: Position 1 CTR drops by 34.5% when AI Overviews appear, based on 300,000 keywords.
• Amsive: Average CTR decline of 15.49%, with sharper drops in certain cases (e.g., -37.04% when combined with featured snippets), based on 700,000
  keywords.
  
  

Non-branded keywords: AI Overviews are more likely to appear for non-branded searches, which also experience the largest CTR declines:

• Amsive: CTR down 19.98% on non-branded terms.
• Ahrefs: Focused on informational intent, showing a 99.2% overlap with AI Overviews.
  

Lower rankings = bigger CTR losses: By pushing organic results further down the page, AI Overviews reduce visibility even for high-ranking pages. Amsive reports a 27.04% CTR drop for keywords outside the Top 3 positions.

Branded queries see a different effect: Branded keywords trigger AI Overviews less frequently (only 4.79%), but when they do, CTR actually rises by 18.68%, likely due to stronger user intent and brand familiarity, according to Amsive.


According to these studies, total clicks are decreasing, and many high-ranking websites in traditional search results are not appearing in AI Overviews.