Blog · 25 September 2026 · By HeardOf

Do AI Overviews cut clicks? The published figures, with what each one measured

Do AI Overviews reduce clicks?

Yes, in the overall figure of each of the eleven studies and reports in the table below, read on 25 September 2026: each prints a lower click-through rate, or fewer clicks, where a Google AI Overview appears than where it does not, or than before it arrived. They do not share a unit. Ahrefs measures the rate of the page in position 1, or of whole domains; Seer Interactive the organic rate on the queries of the brands it tracks; Pew Research Center the share of visits to a results page that end in a click. So on these pages the question do AI Overviews reduce clicks has one direction and no single size, and this post does not average, rank or subtract figures in different units.

Two figures inside the same studies point the other way. Amsive's branded keywords that triggered an Overview saw click-through rate rise 18.68% on average, against a 15.49% fall across all its keywords that now trigger one (16 April 2025, historical). Seer's rate on queries with an Overview rose from 1.3% in December 2025 to 2.4% in February 2026, still below the 3.8% it measured without one that month (24 April 2026, historical).

What does each study measure, and in which unit?

Twelve pages, eleven with a figure, and no two share a unit, a sample and a window.

Why does Ahrefs print both 34.5% and 58%?

Because it ran one design over two windows. Ahrefs' study of 17 April 2025, historical, took 150,000 keywords with an Overview and 150,000 informational keywords without one, and compared the average desktop click-through rate of the page in position 1 in March 2024 and March 2025, from aggregated Search Console data. The fall on the keywords without an Overview set a forecast for the others, and their actual rate came in 34.5% under it. Its update, dated 4 February 2026 on the page, historical (its metadata alone carries a modification date of 27 August 2026), ran the same design on December 2023 against December 2025 and got 58%, falling to 19.4% at position 10. Ahrefs' headline findings say "correlated with" and "correlates with"; its titles and calculations say "reduce". Neither page names a country for its sample; the April 2025 page mentions only "the US rollout" as its dividing line.

What did Ahrefs measure in France?

A before and after on one launch date. Google brought AI Overviews to France on 22 July 2026, and Ahrefs' study of 16 September 2026 compared 963 domains' click-through rate over the 28 days before with the 9 days after, from aggregated Search Console data. Domains with an Overview on more than 20% of their queries had a median change of −23.1%, raw; a control group under 2% rose 2.3%, and Ahrefs puts the effect net of it at −24.8%. Across all 963 the median was −5.7% for click-through rate and −8.8% for clicks. It is the one row in the table dated within 90 days of our read, and it measures whole domains across all their queries, so its 23.1% is not on the scale of Ahrefs' own 58%. The window is nine days; the page's closing section says "two weeks", and Ahrefs writes that it will re-run the analysis over a longer window.

Is the effect getting worse or easing?

The pages disagree, on different data. Ahrefs reads its runs as worsening, from −34.5% in spring 2025 to −58% by the end of 2025, and writes of France that the impact "is likely to get worse". Seer Interactive's third study, 24 April 2026, historical, followed 53 brands from January 2025 to February 2026 and found the rate on queries with an Overview climbing from a floor of 1.3% to 2.4% in two months, while saying it is not "suggesting you forecast growth or recovery based on only Jan-Feb 2026 data". Ahrefs' runs rest on keywords from its own database and Seer's on the queries of the brands it tracks, labelled by their latest snapshot for every month, so neither page settles the other.

Seer's second study, 4 November 2025, historical, measures three groups in one unit on the same 3,119 search terms: in the third quarter of 2025, year on year, organic click-through rate fell 65.2% where an Overview appeared and the client was not cited, 49.4% where it was cited, and 46.2% where no Overview appeared.

Where do the round numbers that circulate come from?

Mostly from the pages above, relayed in shorter form. SparkToro's post of 8 June 2026, historical, says AI Overviews "when present, reduce CTR by nearly 60%", and its "60%" links to Ahrefs' 58% page. Ahrefs' update cites corroboration, "Seer Interactive (organic CTR down between 49.4% to 65.2%), Kevin Indig (>50%), Authoritas (47.5%), and even the Daily Mail (reporting 80-90% lower CTR)", and its France study repeats the first three. On Seer's page, the 49.4% and 65.2% sit beside the 46.2% fall for queries with no Overview. Authoritas' 47.5% is on desktop, 37.7% on mobile, for 3,500 news search terms from UK publishers' stories of 16 to 22 April 2025, as Press Gazette reported it on 30 July 2025, historical. The Daily Mail's "80-90%" links to Seer's November 2025 page, which, as served and in a headless-browser render that drew the article, carries no mention of the Mail and no 80 or 90 per cent. What we found about the Mail is Press Gazette's report of 13 May 2025, historical, of a talk by its director of SEO: on 5,000 keywords the Mail targets, click-through rate was 56.1% lower on desktop and 48.2% lower on mobile when an Overview appeared.

What does Google say about AI Overviews and clicks?

That clicks are stable in aggregate, with no figure. On 6 August 2025, historical, Liz Reid, VP, Head of Google Search, wrote that "total organic click volume from Google Search to websites has been relatively stable year-over-year", and that third-party reports of "dramatic declines in aggregate traffic" are "often based on flawed methodologies, isolated examples, or traffic changes that occurred prior to the roll out of AI features in Search". On 14 May 2024, historical, Google wrote that "the links included in AI Overviews get more clicks than if the page had appeared as a traditional web listing for that query". Neither post prints a figure for the change, a sample or a method; the August post's only quantity is "billions of clicks to websites every day", and total click volume is a different unit from every rate in the table. Our post on Gartner's search-volume prediction quotes the same August 2025 statement in the same post as SparkToro's shares of Google searches that end with no click; those shares count searches with and without an Overview alike, and are not repeated here.

What could we not read?

Six things. Kevin Indig's figure: his linked page serves its opening lines, then offers to "Continue reading this post for free" or a paid subscription; we did neither and read no figure there. Authoritas' own report: Press Gazette links only Authoritas' home page, and Authoritas' sitemap and research index list no such report. A BusinessWire release titled "New Research: Google's AI Overviews Now Cost Websites 58% of Their Clicks" on a search result page, whose address carries the date 18 May 2026, which answered 403; the search result's snippet names Ahrefs, and we could not confirm that on the release itself. Amsive's window, data source and country, which are not in the page's text as served; its charts are images and we took no figure from them. BrightEdge's sample, which its release does not state; the report it links is marked "Not for Distribution Without Consent", so we did not use it. And a country for nine of the twelve pages: only Pew's, Press Gazette's report of Authoritas and Ahrefs' France study name one for the figure we print.

What does this mean for a B2B software company?

That the figure that answers it for you is in your own Search Console, and these pages say where to look. Ahrefs' France study offers a rough rule, "every extra point of AI Overview exposure costs you roughly one point of click-through rate", with its own warning that "a slope is not a prediction". Two studies split their own figure, and each split is a question for your own data: Amsive's, with SaaS among its five industries, found branded keywords rising and non-branded ones falling, and Seer's found the rate higher where the brand was cited in the Overview than where it was not. Whether an AI Overview names you and cites your pages when a buyer asks is what HeardOf records: Overviews became one of the engines we ask on 23 September 2026, per our post on which engines we check, as updated 23 September 2026, from our own systems. We record the answer, not whether anyone clicked, as of 23 September 2026.

How was this read?

Every page in the table was fetched on 25 September 2026 between 04:42 and 04:49 UTC with curl and a Chrome user-agent string, one machine, one location, and read in full; each figure was found in the text of the page it is attributed to. Seer Interactive's November 2025 page was also rendered in headless Chrome at 04:49 UTC before the statement that it carries no Daily Mail figure. URLs came from Ahrefs' and Seer's sitemaps, links on pages we read, Authoritas' sitemap, and Brave search result pages for seven queries, the last two of which answered with a captcha and were not used. Historical means older than 90 days on the reading day, so dated on or before 27 June 2026. No page we read carried text addressed to AI assistants or agents. Everything this post says about the sources carries a link or a date you can open; what it says about our own system comes from our own systems and cannot be checked from here.

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