AI Overviews reduce clicks. Every serious study agrees on that. What changed in 2026 is the detail: the loss stopped getting worse, and being cited in the Overview turned out to matter more than whether an Overview appears at all.
The Studies Side by Side
| Study | Method | Headline finding |
|---|---|---|
| Ahrefs, April 2025 | Keyword-level CTR from Search Console data | AI Overviews cut clicks to the top result by 34.5% |
| Ahrefs, Dec 2025 update | 300,000 keywords, half with an AIO, Dec 2023 vs Dec 2025 | Position-one CTR 58% lower when an AIO appears |
| Pew Research Center | Browsing data from 900+ US adults, March 2025, 68,879 searches | 8% click rate with an AI summary vs 15% without |
| Seer Interactive, April 2026 | 53 brands, 5.47M queries, 2.43B organic impressions, Jan 2025 to Feb 2026 | AIO organic CTR fell to 1.31% in Dec 2025, then recovered to 2.36% by Feb 2026 |
The Loss Grows Further Down the Page
Ahrefs' December 2025 update breaks the loss out by position. It is largest at the top and shrinks further down, because the Overview takes clicks mostly from the results it replaces:
| Position | CTR change when an AIO appears |
|---|---|
| 1 | -58% |
| 2 | -50.8% |
| 3 | -46.4% |
| 5 | -32.6% |
| 10 | -19.4% |
Pew adds the user-side view. Links inside the summary itself were clicked on only 1% of visits, and users ended their browsing session after 26% of searches with a summary against 16% without one.
The 2026 Recovery
Seer's third study is the first long enough to show a trend rather than a snapshot. Organic CTR on queries with an Overview went from 2.14% in September 2025 down to 1.31% in December, then back up to 2.36% in February 2026, an 85% rebound from the low point. It did not get back to the no-Overview baseline, which itself rose to 3.82% over the same period. Paid CTR on Overview queries rose from 14.64% to 16.21%, while paid CTR without an Overview fell to 21.85%.
A plausible reading is that users learned what Overviews are good for and started clicking through when they wanted depth. It is too early to call it a permanent reversal.
Citation Is the Real Variable
Seer's most useful result is per million impressions on the same kind of query:
| Situation | Organic clicks per 1M impressions |
|---|---|
| No AI Overview | ~33,500 |
| AIO shown, brand cited | ~20,743 |
| AIO shown, brand not cited | ~9,445 |
Being cited earns about 120% more clicks than not being cited. It still trails the no-Overview world by 38%, so citation limits the damage without undoing it.
Brand Visibility Implications
You cannot stop Google showing an Overview, but you can influence whether you are cited in it, and that one factor is worth more than doubling your clicks on affected queries. Track which of your priority queries trigger an Overview, whether you are cited, and who is cited instead. Rank tracking alone no longer tells you this: a position-one result that is not cited now earns fewer clicks than a lower result that is. See AI Overviews citation patterns and how to get cited.
Methodology
Figures come from published first-party and panel studies, each cited at the point of use: Google's I/O 2026 keynote and Q2 2026 earnings remarks, Previsible's AI Traffic Report, SE Ranking's Claude traffic research, Goodie's AI Search Traffic Report, Seer Interactive, Ahrefs, Pew Research Center, and Semrush. We report each study's own date range next to its numbers because these studies measure different panels over different windows. Where they disagree, we show the disagreement rather than averaging it away. Figures are as of September 2026 and are reviewed quarterly.
How Presenc AI Helps
Presenc AI monitors Google AI Overviews for your priority queries and records whether your brand is cited, which competitors are, and how that changes over time, so you can see the citation gap behind a CTR drop.