AI Overviews and your click-through rate: what the numbers say

The most useful public dataset on this so far is Seer Interactive's, published April 2026: 53 brands, 5.47 million tracked queries, 2.43 billion organic impressions, covering January 2025 to February 2026. Three numbers from it are worth committing to memory.

For informational queries, averaged across the year:

• No AI Overview shown: 3.35% organic CTR.
• AI Overview shown, your brand cited in it: 2.07%.
• AI Overview shown, your brand not cited: 0.94%.

So being cited roughly doubles your clicks compared with being ignored — Seer puts it at +120% — and still leaves you about 38% below where you would have been if the AI Overview had not appeared at all.

Both halves of that matter, and most coverage only reports one of them.

The half that is bad news

There is no version of this where the AI Overview is good for your traffic. If you were ranking first for an informational query and an AI Overview appears, your clicks fall whether or not you are in it. Being cited is damage control, not upside.

Anyone telling you that AI visibility work will grow your organic traffic on those queries is selling something. What it does is determine how much of the remaining traffic you keep.

The half that is good news

The gap between cited and not cited — 2.07 against 0.94 — is the largest single lever available on a query that has an AI Overview. Doubling is not a rounding error, and unlike your position in the blue links, almost nobody is competing for it deliberately yet.

There is also a quieter finding in the same data: CTR on queries with no AI Overview went up, from 2.8% in January 2025 to 3.8% in February 2026. Fewer results are getting clicked, but the ones that do get clicked are getting a bigger share. Queries where Google chooses not to generate an overview — usually transactional, local, or genuinely ambiguous — became more valuable over that period, not less.

What this changes about reporting

Your organic sessions line is now measuring two different things added together, and it will keep going down for reasons that have nothing to do with your work. If you report a single traffic number to someone who signs off budgets, you are going to have a bad quarter that you did not earn.

Split it. Which of your queries trigger an AI Overview, and are you cited in those? What is happening to the ones that do not? Those two segments are moving in opposite directions and averaging them tells you nothing.

Google Search Console will not split it for you — impressions and clicks arrive with no flag for whether an overview was shown. You need query-level AI Overview presence from somewhere else and a join on the query string. It is a bit of work, and it is the difference between knowing what happened and guessing.

And the thing Google says about getting cited

Gary Illyes, at a Search Central event in July 2025: "To get your content to appear in AI Overview, simply use normal SEO practices. You don't need GEO, LLMO or anything else."

Take that at roughly face value. There is no separate discipline here, and the vendors who have invented one are mostly reselling the SEO you already know with a new acronym. What is genuinely new is the measurement: you cannot see AI Overview citations in Search Console, so unless you are tracking them somewhere, you are optimising against a number you do not have.

Sources: Seer Interactive, AIO Impact on Google CTR, 2026 update · Search Engine Land on Illyes' remarks