Google AI Overview Impact on SEO: 2026 Data

This article covers the published research on Google AI Overview impact on SEO - what the numbers show, which queries are most affected, and how the picture changed through 2026. For the tactical response, see How to Optimize for AI Overviews and What Triggers an AI Overview in Ecommerce.

How widely deployed are AI Overviews?

Before looking at impact, the deployment scale matters.

Google began a US rollout of AI Overviews in May 2024. By May 2025, the company reported 1.5 billion monthly users across 200+ countries. By Q1 2026 earnings, that figure stood at "more than 2 billion" monthly users.

At the keyword level, SE Ranking's study of 100,013 US keywords (collected June 2024) found 8.71% triggered an AI Overview. Ads appear alongside AI Overviews in 87% of AIO-triggered SERPs - making it an ad-adjacent surface, not a clean replacement for organic results.

AI Overviews do not appear on every search. Google deploys them selectively - primarily on queries where an AI-generated answer serves the user. That selection pattern determines which businesses and content types face the most exposure.

CTR impact: three independent measurements

Three organizations published rigorous CTR analyses between 2025 and early 2026. Different methodologies, consistent direction.

Seer Interactive: 15-month longitudinal study

Seer tracked 3,119 informational and educational search terms across 42 client organizations from June 2024 through September 2025. The dataset covered 25.1 million organic impressions and 1.1 million paid impressions.

Organic CTR on AIO-present queries fell from 1.76% in June 2024 to 0.61% by September 2025 - a 61% decline over 15 months. Paid CTR on the same queries fell from 19.70% to 6.34%, a 68% drop. Both declined progressively rather than in a single step.

Seer segmented by citation status - whether the tracked brand appeared named within the AI Overview:

Condition	Organic CTR (Q3 2025)	Year-over-year change
AIO present, brand cited	0.70%	-49.4%
AIO present, not cited	0.52%	-65.2%
No AIO present	1.45%	-46.2%

Two things stand out. First, even non-AIO queries saw CTR fall year-over-year (-46.2%), suggesting forces beyond AI Overviews are compressing click rates broadly. Second, citation status materially changes the result: brands cited in an AI Overview see 35% more organic clicks and 91% more paid clicks than uncited brands on the same AIO-present queries.

Ahrefs: 300,000-keyword cross-sectional study

Ahrefs published an updated analysis in February 2026, comparing 150,000 keywords with AI Overviews to 150,000 without, using aggregated Google Search Console CTR data.

Finding: the presence of an AI Overview correlates with a 58% lower average CTR for the top-ranking result. At position one, the average informational keyword CTR dropped from 0.073% in December 2023 to 0.016% by December 2025 - a decline that accelerated as AI Overviews expanded.

An earlier Ahrefs study from April 2025 had found a 34.5% CTR reduction, meaning the measured impact roughly doubled between mid-2025 and year-end.

Pew Research Center: behavioral data from 900 US adults

Pew's approach tracked actual browsing behavior from 900 US adults during March 2025 - 68,879 unique Google queries in total.

In March 2025, 18% of searches in their sample triggered an AI Overview. Users clicked an organic result in 8% of AIO-present searches, versus 15% without one. Clicking links inside the AI summary itself happened in roughly 1% of visits.

Pew also measured session abandonment: 26% of sessions that included an AIO-present search ended without the user visiting any external website, versus 16% for non-AIO sessions.

What the three studies together show

These studies measure different things and produce different magnitudes - Pew implies roughly a 47% click reduction, Seer and Ahrefs find 58-61%. No credible study finds AI Overviews traffic-neutral. The direction is consistent across all three.

Which query types trigger AI Overviews?

SE Ranking's 100,013-keyword study provides the clearest breakdown by query type.

By query length:

Single-word queries trigger an AI Overview 0.8% of the time. Ten-word queries trigger one 19.10% of the time. Longer, question-format queries consistently draw more AI Overviews - the "how," "why," and "what is the best" type searches.

By niche:

Niche	AIO trigger rate
Relationships	26.62%
Food and Beverage	24.78%
Technology	18.11%
Career and Jobs	0.14%
Cars	0.12%
Real Estate	0.12%

A food publisher and a car dealer live in completely different AIO exposure environments. The spread across niches (0.12% to 26.62%) is wider than most SEOs anticipated when AI Overviews launched.

By commercial signal:

SE Ranking's data shows queries with $0-$0.50 CPC made up 53.65% of AIO-triggering keywords. Queries with over $6 CPC - high-intent terms advertisers pay premium rates for - made up only 0.57% of AIO triggers.

This reflects Google's apparent deployment logic: AI Overviews serve low-commercial-intent queries where a synthesized answer works. High-intent purchase queries remain primarily ad-served for now.

The shift toward commercial queries:

That logic is evolving. Semrush's longitudinal tracking shows informational queries dropped from 91.3% of AIO triggers in January 2025 to 57.1% by October 2025. Commercial queries grew from roughly 7% to roughly 19% over the same period. The AIO surface is expanding toward commercial territory.

Shopping and ecommerce queries

The ecommerce-specific data shows the fastest expansion of any tracked segment.

Visibility Labs analyzed 20.9 million shopping keywords and found AI Overviews appearing on 14% of them as of early 2026. In November 2024, that rate was approximately 2.1% - a 5.6x expansion in a few months.

The expansion is concentrated at the research phase of the purchase funnel:

Query type	AIO trigger rate
Research queries ("best air fryer")	83%
Transactional queries ("buy air fryer")	13%

Google is inserting AI answers at the product evaluation stage, not the decision-to-purchase moment. For a DTC brand, the category research phase is increasingly won or lost in the AIO layer, before users reach product listings.

Category variation is significant. Grocery and food showed 49% AIO presence; furniture remained around 2%. Text-based comparison categories attract more AI coverage than visually-evaluated ones.

Publisher traffic: the downstream picture

Individual CTR data shows per-query impact. Aggregate referral data shows what this means at scale.

Chartbeat's 2026 analysis found small publishers lost roughly 60% of search referrals over the preceding two years. Large publishers lost about 22% over the same window. The asymmetry reflects how AI answers draw on high-authority content, consolidating remaining clicks toward established publishers.

HubSpot disclosed a 70-80% organic traffic decline, which SEO analysts widely attributed to AI Overviews capturing the informational content that had historically been their primary traffic source.

The Pew behavioral data provides individual-level context: 26% of AIO-present sessions ended without the user visiting any external site, versus 16% for non-AIO sessions. Some share of that aggregate traffic decline is session-level abandonment - users getting their answer from the AI summary and stopping.

Zero-click behavior: what the Pew data shows

The 26% session abandonment figure from Pew deserves specific attention because it measures something CTR data doesn't capture.

CTR data measures what percentage of users click an organic result given that they saw the SERP. Session abandonment data measures what percentage of users never visit any website after seeing a search result page with an AI Overview. Those users didn't click a different result instead - they left Google entirely.

This is behaviorally different from the pre-AIO pattern of zero-click searches (where a featured snippet answered a query without a click). The AI Overview is longer and more detailed - it more often fully satisfies a query where a featured snippet only partially answered it - which drives higher session abandonment rates than any previous SERP feature.

For content creators whose business model depends on driving site visits from informational queries, the session abandonment rate is arguably a more material metric than CTR on individual keywords.

The citation effect: why being named in an AIO changes the equation

Seer's data consistently shows that citation status is the primary variable in how AI Overviews affect a brand's traffic.

Brands cited in AI Overviews earn 35% more organic clicks and 91% more paid clicks compared to uncited brands on the same AIO-present queries. This is counterintuitive - you might expect being mentioned in a summary that answers the question would reduce the need to click through. The data says the opposite.

One behavioral explanation: users who see a brand named in an authoritative AI answer experience a trust signal. They are more likely to click that brand because the AI has implicitly recommended it, not less likely. The citation functions more like an endorsement than a traffic substitute.

This shifts how to think about AIO impact. It is not simply "AI Overviews steal clicks." More precisely: AI Overviews redistribute clicks toward cited brands and away from uncited brands. The total available click pool shrinks, but the distribution within it changes sharply based on who's named.

Has the impact stabilized? Early 2026 data

The 2025 trajectory was a consistent decline. Early 2026 data changed the picture.

Seer's April 2026 update - their larger study of 5.47 million queries and 2.43 billion impressions across 53 brands, running January 2025 through February 2026 - found AIO-present organic CTR at a floor of 1.3% in December 2025, then recovering to 2.4% by February 2026. That's an 85% rebound from the September 2025 low.

Non-AIO query CTR rose over the same period, from about 2.8% to 3.8%. As of February 2026, the gap between AIO-present and AIO-absent queries stood at roughly 37%.

What drove the rebound is not definitively established. Possible factors include changes in which queries Google deploys AI Overviews on, the growing share of commercial queries (which historically had higher CTRs than informational), or behavioral adaptation by users with two years of AIO experience.

The practical reading: the 2025 decline has not continued in a straight line into 2026. The stabilized picture still represents a meaningful CTR gap versus pre-AIO baselines and versus non-AIO queries, but the worst point appears to have been late 2025.

What the data collectively shows

Six things the published record establishes with reasonable confidence:

The CTR impact is real and directional. Three independent studies using different methodologies all measure meaningful CTR reductions on AIO-present queries. The magnitudes differ (47-61%), but the direction is consistent across all studies.

Informational content bears the primary burden. Longer, question-format, low-CPC queries drive the highest AIO trigger rates. Commercial and navigational queries face much lower exposure for now.

Shopping search is the fastest-moving dimension. The 5.6x expansion in AIO presence on shopping queries from late 2024 to early 2026 outpaces any other measured segment. The research phase of the ecommerce funnel is being reshaped.

Citation status is the key variable. Being named in an AIO correlates with higher CTR than being absent from it on the same query. The AIO redistributes clicks more than it simply removes them.

Small publishers lost disproportionately. The ~60% search referral decline for small publishers versus ~22% for large publishers suggests AI Overviews consolidate traffic upward in the authority hierarchy.

The initial shock partially stabilized. The CTR floor appears to have been in late 2025. The recovered rate still trails pre-AIO baselines, but the direction shifted in early 2026.

For guidance on how to respond to these patterns in your content and store setup, see How to Optimize for AI Overviews and What Triggers an AI Overview in Ecommerce.

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