Do AI Overviews and Featured Snippets Reduce Organic Click-Through Rates? Here's the Actual Number

Yes, and it's not a small dip. It's one of the biggest single-feature hits to organic clicks Google has ever rolled out. If your traffic has felt off lately even though your rankings look fine, this is probably why.

This is a different problem than “does AI content rank.” Your page can hold position 1 and still get way fewer clicks than it used to, simply because Google answered the question before anyone reached your link. Let's get into the real numbers.

1. The Headline Stat

Ahrefs ran the most rigorous version of this study using 300,000 keywords, split evenly between queries with an AI Overview present and similar informational queries without one. As of December 2025, they found the presence of an AI Overview correlates with a 58% lower average click-through rate for the page ranking in position 1.

That's not a one-off finding either. Multiple independent studies landed in the same range. Seer Interactive, tracking over 3,100 queries and 42 organizations, found organic CTR dropped 61%, falling from 1.76% down to 0.61% when AI Overviews appeared. Other researchers found similar territory, with drops ranging from 47.5% to over 50%, and some outlets reporting numbers as high as 80–90% for specific query types.

So depending on exactly who measured it and how, you're looking at roughly half to two-thirds of your expected clicks disappearing the moment an AI Overview shows up above your result.

2. It Gets Worse the Higher You Rank

Here's the part that stings a little extra if you've been chasing position 1 this whole time. Ahrefs broke the impact down by ranking position, and the pattern is brutal for anyone at the top.

Position 1 saw a 58.0% CTR drop. Position 2 saw 50.8%. It keeps sliding down from there, all the way to position 10 at 19.4%. In other words, the page working hardest to rank #1 loses the most clicks proportionally. Being the “best answer” used to guarantee the most traffic. Now it mostly guarantees your content gets summarized instead of visited.

3. This Isn't Just Correlation Anymore

For a while, skeptics could say “maybe this is just correlation, maybe AI Overviews show up more on queries that were already low-click.” A newer study fixed that problem directly.

Researchers ran a randomized experiment, meaning they controlled who saw an AI Overview and who didn't, isolating cause and effect instead of just spotting a pattern. Removing the AI Overview from the top of the page nearly doubled outbound clicks. The researchers stated plainly that AI Overviews divert traffic away from publishers without delivering measurable improvements in user experience.

Pew Research backed this up with real-world behavior data. Users click through only 8% of the time when an AI Overview is present, compared to 15% without one, roughly a 47% relative drop in click behavior.

4. The Bigger Picture: Zero-Click Is Just... Normal Now

AI Overviews are part of a much bigger shift. The overall zero-click rate, meaning searches that end without any click at all, has climbed from around 50% in 2019 to nearly 65% in 2026. That trend started before AI Overviews even existed, thanks to featured snippets and knowledge panels, but AI Overviews accelerated it hard. In AI Mode specifically, where Google replaces search results entirely with a conversational interface, the zero-click rate hits roughly 93%.

Organic click share overall dropped 11 to 23 percentage points across multiple industries between January 2025 and January 2026, while paid ad clicks gained ground in the same window. It's giving one clear trend: the traditional “rank high, get clicks” model is quietly breaking down.

5. It's Not All Doom Though

Here's the twist that actually matters for strategy. The clicks that do survive an AI Overview convert better. One analysis found AI Overviews reduce organic CTR by an average of 18%, but the users who still click through convert 23% better, since they've already read a summary and are seeking something deeper.

Separately, brands that get cited inside AI Overviews earn 35% more organic clicks and 91% more paid clicks compared to brands on the same query that don't get cited at all.

So the smarter framing isn't “traffic is dying.” It's “traffic is getting smaller, more intentional, and increasingly gated behind whether you get cited in the first place.”

6. What Actually Helps Right Now

7. The Bottom Line

AI Overviews and featured snippets are cutting organic click-through rates by roughly half in most recent studies, and the highest-ranking pages are losing the most, proportionally. This isn't a temporary glitch, it's a structural shift in how search works, backed now by both large-scale data and a real randomized experiment.

The traffic isn't gone forever, though. It's shifting toward citation-based visibility, and the brands adapting to that shift early are the ones still seeing real clicks come through.

8. Sources

• Ahrefs: Google AI Overviews Reduce Organic CTR by 58%
• Search Engine Journal: Study Confirms Google AI Overviews Cut Organic Clicks 38%
• Digital Applied: Zero-Click Search Statistics 2026: Complete Data Guide
• Omnibound: AI SEO Statistics 2026: 57+ Data Points
• Omnibound: Zero-Click Search Statistics 2026: 52+ Data Points
• Contently: AI Overviews and Organic Traffic: What the 2026 Data Actually Shows

9. Frequently Asked Questions