Overview Oversights: The Effect Of Google’s AI Overviews On Click-Through Rates

Last May, when The Verge interviewed Google CEO Sundar Pichai after the release of AI Overviews, the concern that publishers all shared about their traffic-driving URLs be buried under a block of AI-generated text at the top of Google’s search results was met with what felt like optimistic reassurances.

“If you put content and links within AI Overviews,” Pichai said, “they get higher clickthrough rates than if you put it outside of AI Overviews.”

Now, with a year of anecdotal evidence seemingly pointing to the contrary, publishers now have the receipts.

According to a recent Ahrefs study, click-through rates for top-ranking pages are averaging 34.5% less where an AI Overview is present.

To conduct its research, Ahrefs looked at 150,000 keywords with an AI Overview and 150,000 keywords without an AI Overview but with “informational intent” (as its research found that 99.2% of keywords that ultimately trigger an AI Overview “are informational in intent”). Comparing March 2024 and March 2025 samples, each group saw dropoffs in their click-through rates (CTR).

(Source: Ahrefs)

“In March 2024, the average position one CTR for informational keywords was 0.056,” writes Ahrefs’ Ryan Law and Xibeijia Guan. “In March 2025, this had dropped to 0.031. In March 2024, the average position one CTR for AI Overview keywords was 0.073. In March 2025, this had dropped to 0.026.”

After forecasting the CTRs had AI Overviews not been planted at the top and comparing that to the 0.026 CTR, Ahrefs arrived at the 34.5% reduction, which it says aligns with reports that sites are seeing 20-40% less clicks since AI Overviews’ release.

“Although AI Overviews often contain citation links, there can be many of these links cited, making it less likely for any single link to earn the lion’s share of clicks,” the article says. “There is still no way to disambiguate AI Overview clicks and impressions from the rest of your Search Console data. It seems that Google doesn’t want us to see the clickthrough rate for AI Overviews.”

“Assuming AI Overviews stay in this current form, this is also likely the highest the CTR will be.”