2026 SEO Industry Report: How AI Overviews Are Rewriting Organic Click-Through Rates
The presence of a Google AI Overview cuts the average click-through rate for the #1 organic result by 58%, according to Ahrefs’ analysis of 300,000 keywords — but CTR on AI Overview citations is already recovering, climbing 85% from a low of 1.3% in December 2025 to 2.4% in February 2026, according to Seer Interactive’s ongoing study of 53 brands across 5.47 million queries and 2.43 billion impressions.
The Scale of the CTR Hit
Ahrefs compared 150,000 keywords with AI Overviews present against 150,000 informational keywords without them, using December 2025 data benchmarked against a December 2023 baseline:
| Organic Position | CTR Change When AI Overview Present |
| Position 1 | -58% |
| Position 2 | -50.8% |
| Lower positions | Progressively smaller decline |
In practical terms: for every 100 clicks a #1-ranking page historically earned, Google’s AI Overview now intercepts roughly 58 of them before the user ever reaches the blue links. Source: Ahrefs, AI Overviews Reduce Clicks (December 2025 update).
CTR Is Recovering — But Only for Cited Brands
Seer Interactive’s ongoing tracking (January 2025–February 2026, 53 brands, 5.47 million queries, 2.43 billion impressions) shows the CTR hit bottoming out and starting to recover — but recovery isn’t evenly distributed:
| Scenario | Click-Through Rate |
| No AI Overview present | ~3.3% |
| AI Overview present, brand cited | ~2.1% |
| AI Overview present, brand not cited | ~0.9% |
Being cited inside the AI Overview itself — not just ranking in the traditional results below it — is now worth roughly 2.3x the CTR of appearing on the same SERP without a citation. The overall AI Overview CTR climbed from 1.3% in December 2025 to 2.4% in February 2026, an 85% two-month increase, though Seer notes that for some brands “clicks stayed flat while impressions grew,” meaning AI Overviews are simply appearing more often rather than converting at meaningfully higher rates yet. Source: Search Engine Land, covering Seer Interactive’s study.
Where AI Overviews Show Up Most
AI Overview prevalence varies sharply by query type, and this is arguably the most useful number in the whole dataset for prioritizing content work:
| Query Type | AI Overview Prevalence |
| Comparison queries (“X vs Y”) | ~95% |
| Question queries | ~86% |
| General informational queries | ~36% |
| Transactional queries | ~5% |
This pattern matters for where SEO investment is most exposed: content built around comparison and how-to formats faces near-universal AI Overview competition, while bottom-of-funnel, transactional content is largely untouched by this shift so far. The gap between comparison queries (95%) and transactional queries (5%) is close to a 19x difference in exposure — which means two SEO programs targeting the same overall keyword volume can have wildly different risk profiles depending on whether that volume skews toward “best X for Y” comparison content or toward “buy X” transactional intent.
What This Means for SEO Strategy
Three things follow from combining both studies. First, ranking #1 no longer guarantees the click volume it used to on informational and comparison queries — a 58% CTR hit at position one is large enough to change content prioritization, not just tweak it. Second, since being cited inside the AI Overview is worth more than double the CTR of an uncited appearance on the same page, “getting cited” (structured, extractable, directly-quotable content) is now a distinct optimization target from “ranking well,” and the two don’t automatically move together. Third, the 5% AI Overview prevalence on transactional queries means SEO programs built around bottom-of-funnel, high-intent keywords are the least exposed to this disruption — informational content built purely for top-of-funnel traffic volume is where the CTR math has changed the most, and where a content strategy weighted too heavily toward comparison-style content is now carrying meaningfully more platform risk than one weighted toward transactional intent.
Sources
- Ahrefs — AI Overviews Reduce Clicks (December 2025 update), based on 300,000 keywords.
- Search Engine Land — Google AI Overviews CTR Recovery Study, covering Seer Interactive’s analysis of 53 brands, January 2025–February 2026.
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