Google's Organic Click-Through Rate Is Cracking Under AI Overviews: The 2025-2026 Data

The Classic CTR Curve, Before AI Overviews

Long before AI Overviews existed, the shape of organic CTR was already steep and consistent across independent studies. Sistrix's analysis of more than 80 million keywords found position 1 organic results averaged a 28.5% click-through rate, dropping to 15.7% at position 2, 11.0% at position 3, and just 2.5% by position 10¹. Backlinko's 2025 update, built from 4 million search results across 1,312,881 pages and 12,166,560 queries, found a similar curve: 27.6% CTR at position 1, with the top 3 results together capturing 54.4% of all clicks and only 0.63% of searchers ever reaching page two¹¹. An earlier, separate Backlinko and ClickFlow study of 5,079,491 queries across 874,929 URLs, published back in 2019, found position 1 taking 31.7% of clicks and just 0.78% of users clicking through to page two¹². That consistency across a six-year gap and different datasets is the baseline everything below is measured against.

Advanced Web Ranking's Q1 2025 tracking, run continuously across thousands of sites and millions of keywords, recorded the same pre-AI-Overview-surge pattern and serves as the last clean before-picture ahead of the changes documented in its Q3 2025 update¹⁴. Position matters differently depending on the query, too: Advanced Web Ranking's April 2023 dataset found branded queries at position 1 pulling a 33.36% CTR versus 25.81% for non-branded queries at the same spot¹⁸.

SERP Features Were Already Eating Into That Curve

Before AI Overviews, other SERP features were already redistributing clicks away from a "pure" organic result. Sistrix's data shows a position-1 result with no competing feature reaching 34.2% CTR. Add sitelinks and it climbs to 46.9%. But a featured snippet pulls it down to 23.3%, a knowledge panel to 16.7%, and Google Ads appearing on the page drops it to roughly 18.8%¹. In other words, ranking #1 was never one fixed number — it already depended heavily on what else Google chose to show alongside it.

Featured snippets specifically don't dominate clicks the way their placement above position 1 might suggest. A 3,500-plus-person survey by Engine Scout found featured snippets capturing 35.1% of total click share on SERPs where they appeared, versus 44% for the remaining standard organic listings and just 6% for "People Also Ask" boxes¹⁵. About 25% of respondents said they mistook the snippet for an advertisement, and roughly 7% avoided it because they didn't realize it was clickable¹⁵ — friction that helps explain why a prominent position doesn't automatically win the click.

Then AI Overviews Arrived

AI Overviews are a different scale of disruption than a featured snippet or knowledge panel, because they synthesize an answer from multiple sources instead of pointing to one. Ahrefs analyzed 300,000 keywords using December 2025 data (150,000 with an AI Overview present, 150,000 without) and found the presence of an AI Overview correlated with a 58% lower average CTR for the top-ranking page — up sharply from the 34.5% reduction the same team measured in April 2025⁵. Position-1 CTR for informational keywords without an AI Overview fell from 0.076 in December 2023 to 0.039 by December 2025; for keywords that triggered an AI Overview, it fell from 0.073 to just 0.016 over the same span⁵. The penalty doesn't stop at position 1: Outerbox's compilation of the same Ahrefs figures shows the AI-Overview CTR decline easing only slightly with depth — -58% at position 1, -50.8% at position 2, -46.4% at position 3¹⁷.

Seer Interactive's original study of 3,119 informational queries across 42 organizations (25.1 million organic and 1.1 million paid impressions, June 2024 through September 2025) found organic CTR on AI-Overview queries fell 61%, from 1.76% to 0.61%, while paid CTR on the same queries fell 68%, from 19.7% to 6.34%³. Even queries where no AI Overview appeared saw organic CTR fall 41% year-over-year over the same period, suggesting the shift in user behavior extends beyond the pages Google visibly changes³. Seer's own April 2026 update, expanding to 53 brands and 5.47 million queries, tracked AI-Overview-present organic CTR bottoming at 1.31% in December 2025 before recovering to 2.36% by February 2026².

Not every analysis reads the damage the same way. First Page Sage's 2026 report estimates position-1 CTR at 38.9% when an AI Overview is present versus 42.9% with a classic featured snippet, arguing organic CTR at the very top position is comparatively insulated even as paid-click volume drops sharply on the same queries¹⁶. And Search Engine Journal's month-by-month look at the Seer dataset found raw click counts don't always fall in step with CTR: tracked organic clicks were 398,798 in September 2025, actually rose slightly to 400,271 in October, then dropped to 301,783 in November⁴. CTR fell to 1.21% in October even as clicks ticked up, because tracked impressions doubled to 33.1 million that month — a reminder that a falling CTR percentage can reflect Google showing a result to more people, not necessarily fewer people clicking it⁴. November's genuine click decline shows the underlying erosion is still real; it just doesn't move in a straight line.

The Citation Gap

Being mentioned inside an AI Overview matters more than being ranked well below one. Across full-year 2025 informational queries, Seer Interactive found organic CTR averaged 3.35% when no AI Overview appeared at all, compared to 2.07% when a brand was cited inside the AI Overview and just 0.94% when it wasn't cited². That's 120% more clicks per impression for a cited brand versus a non-cited one on the identical query type — though even cited brands still ran 38% below the no-AI-Overview baseline².

Independent User Research Agrees, Google Disputes It

The click-level data lines up with direct behavioral research. Pew Research Center tracked 900 U.S. adults across 68,879 Google searches, with 12,593 of those producing an AI summary. Users clicked a traditional search result link in just 8% of visits when an AI summary appeared, versus 15% of visits when it didn't⁶. Clicking a link inside the AI summary itself happened in only 1% of visits⁶, and users ended their session with no further click at all 26% of the time when a summary appeared, versus 16% when it didn't⁶.

Google pushed back publicly on Pew's methodology, calling it "a flawed methodology and skewed queryset that is not representative of Search traffic," while noting its AI Overviews feature reaches 1.5 billion monthly users⁷. That dispute doesn't change what the clickstream-based studies above independently show using entirely different data sources and methods, but it's worth noting Google's own usage-scale claim: at 1.5 billion monthly users, even a modest per-query CTR decline compounds into a large absolute change in how much traffic reaches the open web.

Two-Thirds of Searches Now End Without Any Click

Zooming out from any single ranking position, the aggregate trend is the clearest number in this dataset. SparkToro's June 2026 study, using Similarweb's U.S. clickstream panel across January-April 2026, found 68.01% of Google searches ended without a click of any kind — up from 60.45% in 2024, 49% in 2019, and roughly 45% in 2016⁸. AI Overviews now appear on more than 20% of Google searches and reduce CTR by nearly 60% when present, according to the same report⁸. Similarweb's own write-up of the underlying data adds a device split: only 20.4% of desktop searches produce an external click (48% end with no further activity at all), compared to 45.2% of mobile searches producing an external click⁹.

Search Engine Land's coverage of the same study adds a separate corroborating data point: Ahrefs' own referral-traffic tracker recorded roughly an 8-percentage-point decline in Google referral traffic share to tracked domains between June 2025 and May 2026¹⁰. That's an independent metric, measured a different way, pointing at the same direction of travel as the zero-click figures above.

What Still Gets Clicked

None of this means clicks have vanished from the SERP entirely — they've redistributed. Advanced Web Ranking's Q3 2025 tracking, covering thousands of sites and millions of keywords across 18 industries, found average desktop position-1 CTR down almost a full percentage point (-0.99pp) quarter-over-quarter, while positions 2 through 6 combined gained 8.71pp on branded desktop searches during the same window¹³. The effect isn't uniform by industry: Arts & Entertainment saw the steepest single-position drop, position 1 desktop down 5.13pp, while Travel gained the most, position 2 desktop up 2.46pp¹³. Clicks that used to concentrate almost entirely at the top spot are, in some categories, spreading slightly further down the page rather than disappearing outright.

The Bottom Line

Every dataset in this analysis, gathered with different methodologies, different sample sizes, and different time windows, points the same direction: organic click-through rate on informational queries is down substantially since AI Overviews expanded, the decline is worse specifically on queries where an AI Overview appears, and getting cited inside that AI Overview only partially offsets the loss. At the same time, the position-1-beats-position-10 hierarchy that has held for over a decade of independent measurement hasn't disappeared, it has simply gotten more expensive to occupy in terms of the clicks it actually returns.