AI Overviews Cut Organic Clicks by Nearly 40%: What the Latest Research Means for SEO

A significant amount of previous research around AI Overviews has relied on observational data. That can be valuable, but website traffic can change for many reasons, including ranking movements, seasonality, changing search demand, new SERP features, algorithm updates and competitor activity.

The new research used a custom browser extension to randomly assign users to search experiences with or without AI Overviews. This allowed the researchers to isolate the effect of the AI-generated answer more directly. The result strengthens the argument that AI Overviews are not simply appearing at the same time as declining clicks. Their presence can directly change whether users continue to an organic website.

Google has previously argued that even where AI-powered Search leads to fewer website visits, the visits that remain can be more valuable. In August 2025, Google Search head Liz Reid said average click quality had increased, defining a quality click partly as one where users do not quickly return to the search results after visiting a website. The updated experiment tested this argument using measures including return-to-search behaviour, short visits and time spent on the destination website.

Researchers found no statistically significant difference between users who saw AI Overviews and those who did not. In other words, the additional clicks generated when AI Overviews were removed did not appear to be noticeably lower-quality visits.

The randomised experiment is not the only evidence suggesting that AI Overviews are suppressing organic clicks. Ahrefs originally analysed 300,000 keywords and reported in 2025 that AI Overviews were associated with a substantial reduction in click-through rate for the number-one organic result.

Ahrefs repeated the study using December 2025 data and estimated that the presence of an AI Overview now correlates with a roughly 58% lower average click-through rate for the top-ranking page. The methodologies are different, so the figures should not be treated as directly interchangeable, but both studies point towards a significant change in organic clicking behaviour when AI-generated answers appear.

Google’s position is that examining the click-through rate of an individual search does not necessarily show what is happening across Search as a whole. The company says AI-powered features encourage people to ask more questions, including longer and more complicated queries that they may previously not have searched for at all.

That argument gained further support from Google’s Q2 2026 results. Sundar Pichai said AI Mode had surpassed 1 billion monthly active users and was driving an incremental increase in overall Search queries. Google also says its AI features are sending billions of clicks to websites every week.

Google’s figures and the independent research are not necessarily contradictory. The total number of searches can increase significantly while the probability that an individual search produces an external click falls. AI may be expanding the amount people search while simultaneously answering a greater proportion of those questions within Google itself.

For businesses, this distinction matters enormously. Search demand can grow without every website benefiting equally from that growth. A company could receive more impressions, maintain its rankings and still experience declining organic traffic if a larger percentage of searches are resolved directly through AI Overviews or other search features.

Historically, maintaining a number-one Google ranking generally provided a relatively predictable share of clicks. AI Overviews complicate that relationship because an AI-generated response can sit above the organic results and answer a substantial part of the user’s question before they reach the first traditional listing.

The company beneath that AI Overview might still rank first. Its Search Console impressions could remain strong and its average position may barely change, yet its click-through rate could fall. At the same time, the same company might be prominently cited inside the AI Overview itself. The business has lost traffic, but it has not necessarily lost visibility.

This is why businesses increasingly need to distinguish between traffic performance and visibility performance. Organic sessions, conversions and revenue remain commercially important, but they cannot always show what happened earlier in the customer research process, especially when an AI-generated answer influences the decision without producing an immediate website visit.

Businesses therefore need additional measurements around AI mentions, citations, recommendations, prompt coverage and competitor share of voice. These metrics do not replace Google rankings or website analytics. Instead, they help explain whether a business is present within the answers users increasingly receive before deciding whether they need to click anywhere else.

The new search environment can create combinations of metrics that would previously have appeared contradictory. A company could have stable rankings, increasing Google impressions, more AI citations and a falling organic click-through rate. Another business could maintain website traffic while becoming significantly less visible than its competitors within AI-generated recommendations.

Looking purely at organic sessions can therefore provide an incomplete interpretation of performance. A decline in traffic might represent lost market visibility, but it could also indicate that the search interface itself has changed. The crucial additional question is whether the organisation is appearing inside the AI-generated response that now sits between the user’s query and the traditional organic result.

The research should not be interpreted as evidence that businesses should stop investing in SEO. Google continues to rely on the wider web to support its search experiences, and strong technical SEO, authoritative content, crawlability, structured information and topical relevance remain important foundations for organic visibility.

The purpose of SEO is simply becoming broader. Content can contribute to traditional rankings while also providing the information that search and AI systems use when generating responses. Businesses therefore need to think beyond the click and consider whether their website and wider digital presence provide enough credible evidence for AI systems to understand and reference them.

The practical response should be better measurement rather than panic. Businesses should continue tracking organic rankings, impressions, clicks, click-through rate, conversions and revenue, but those figures should increasingly be compared with what is happening inside AI-generated search experiences.

At AwarenessAI, we approach this through Test, Prioritise, Implement and Monitor. Test the questions customers are asking, identify which businesses and sources appear, prioritise commercially important gaps, implement changes across the website and wider digital footprint, and monitor the results over time as AI answers, citations and recommendations evolve.

AI Overviews reducing organic clicks does not mean Google Search is disappearing. Google argues that AI is actually encouraging people to search more frequently, and AI Mode has already reached more than 1 billion monthly active users. The important change is that more searches do not automatically translate into proportionally more website visits.

The latest randomised research shows a 39.8% reduction in outbound organic clicks when AI Overviews appear, while Ahrefs estimates an even larger effect for the number-one organic result using a different methodology. Traffic still matters, but visibility is becoming a much bigger concept than traffic. Businesses now need to understand not only where they rank, but whether they are present within the AI-generated answers increasingly sitting between the search and the click.