How Google AI Overviews Are Reducing Organic Click-Through Rates



	March 10, 2026

Google’s AI Overviews are having a notable impact on traditional organic listings, particularly for non-branded, informational queries. Recent studies show a clear link between AI Overviews and reduced organic visibility and clicks, especially for top ranking, non branded keywords.

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:

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

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.