Organic click-through drops as much as 61% on Google searches where an AI Overview appears, and the traffic doesn't disappear so much as move to whoever's already trusted. That single number is reshaping how founder-led businesses need to think about search.
Organic click-through on AI Overview searches fell from 1.76% to 0.61% between June 2024 and September 2025, a 61% decline (Seer Interactive, September 2025). That drop isn't evenly distributed. Businesses already cited inside the AI Overview see meaningfully higher clicks than everyone else on the same search results page. Here's the full data, what changed in early 2026, and what actually determines which side of it a business ends up on.
The core numbers: what actually dropped
Seer Interactive's study tracked 3,119 informational queries across 42 organizations, covering 25.1 million organic impressions and 1.1 million paid impressions over 15 months. Organic CTR on queries with an AI Overview fell from 1.76% to 0.61%, a 61% decline. Paid CTR fell even harder, from 19.7% to 6.34%, a 68% decline (Seer Interactive, September 2025).
Pew Research Center found a similar pattern using a different method. When an AI Overview appears, users click a traditional organic result only 8% of the time, compared to 15% when no AI Overview shows up (Pew Research Center, July 2025, based on 68,879 searches). That's a roughly 47% relative drop measured a completely different way, which is what makes the Seer number hard to dismiss as one study's quirk.
Ahrefs measured it from the position-1 seat specifically. The top-ranking organic result gets about 58% fewer clicks when an AI Overview is present, up from a 34.5% drop measured earlier in 2025 (Ahrefs, December 2025, based on 300,000 keywords). The decline itself got worse across most of the period these studies cover, not stabilized.
The recovery is real, but smaller than the headlines suggest
Here's the part most coverage skips. Seer Interactive's 2026 follow-up found AI Overview organic CTR rebounded 85% in the first two months of 2026, rising from a 1.3% floor in December 2025 to 2.4% in February 2026 (Seer Interactive, April 2026). Google added more and better-placed links inside AI Overviews, and some clicks came back.
An 85% rebound sounds like the problem is solving itself. It isn't.
A 2.4% CTR is still well below the 1.76% baseline organic CTR that existed before AI Overviews appeared at all. The honest read: the free-fall has slowed and partially reversed, but the floor is permanently lower than it used to be, not temporarily lower.
It isn't happening evenly, and that's the actionable part
The most useful number in this entire data set isn't the decline. It's the gap between businesses that get cited and businesses that don't. Businesses cited inside an AI Overview earn 35% higher organic CTR and 91% higher paid CTR than non-cited businesses on the exact same queries (Seer Interactive, 2025). Non-cited businesses absorb close to the full 61% decline. Cited businesses don't.
That reframes the whole story. The 61% figure describes what happens to a business that's invisible inside the AI answer. It doesn't describe what happens to a business the AI is already citing. The gap between those two outcomes is the actual size of the opportunity, and it's a gap that widens the longer a business waits to close it.
35% higher organic CTR, 91% higher paid CTR than non-cited competitors
Already capturing a disproportionate share of shrinking traffic
Full exposure to the 61% organic decline
Losing clicks to competitors who are cited, even at the same search position
Same 61% decline, plus a 47% relative drop per Pew's broader measurement
Compounding loss as AI Overviews expand to more query types
Why this can't be waited out
AI Overviews already appear on roughly 48% of tracked Google searches as of February 2026, up from about 31% a year earlier (BrightEdge, February 2026). The share of search where this decline applies keeps growing, not shrinking. A business that isn't cited today is exposed to a bigger version of this problem every quarter that passes, not a smaller one.
The fix isn't complicated in concept, even if it takes real work: get cited. That means the fundamentals AI systems actually check before citing a business, a complete Google Business Profile, consistent reviews, content that answers specific questions directly, and consistent business information across the sources AI cross-references. None of that happens in a single visit. It builds over months, which is exactly why the businesses starting now are the ones capturing the 35-91% side of this data instead of the 61% side of it.
Summary
- Organic CTR on AI Overview searches fell 61%, from 1.76% to 0.61%, between June 2024 and September 2025 (Seer Interactive, September 2025).
- Pew Research Center independently found an 8% click rate with an AI Overview present versus 15% without one (Pew Research Center, July 2025).
- Position-1 organic clicks fell 58% when an AI Overview appears (Ahrefs, December 2025).
- Early 2026 brought an 85% two-month rebound, but the recovered CTR (2.4%) still sits well below the pre-AI-Overview baseline (1.76%) (Seer Interactive, April 2026).
- Being cited inside the AI Overview is what actually changes the outcome: 35% higher organic CTR and 91% higher paid CTR than non-cited businesses on the same queries (Seer Interactive, 2025).
Sources: Seer Interactive, September 2025 (organic and paid CTR decline, 3,119 informational queries) and April 2026 (2026 recovery data). Pew Research Center, July 2025 (AI Overview click behavior, n=68,879). Ahrefs, December 2025 (position-1 CTR impact, 300,000 keywords). BrightEdge, February 2026 (AI Overview prevalence).