Two major studies on AI Overviews and CTRs just confirmed what many people suspected

AI Overviews are significantly decreasing organic CTR – especially for non-branded keywords

Key findings:

  • Ahrefs: Position 1 CTR dropped 34.5% when AI Overviews were present (300,000 keywords analysed).

  • Amsive: Average CTR decline of 15.49% across 700,000 keywords, with drops up to -37.04% when featured snippets were also in play.

Non-branded informational queries are hardest hit

  • Amsive found -19.98% CTR decline on non-branded terms.

  • Ahrefs’ data focused almost entirely on informational intent, where AI Overviews appear most often.

Interestingly, branded queries tell a different story

  • Branded keywords are less likely to trigger AI Overviews (only ~4.8% of the time).

  • When they do, they see a +18.68% CTR boost – likely due to strong user intent and brand familiarity.

Why it matters

Despite Google’s claims that AI Overview citations drive “higher-quality clicks,” overall clicks are down – and many top-ranking pages in Classic Search aren’t being surfaced within AI Overviews at all.

This changes how we think about:

  • Keyword strategy (brand vs. non-brand balance)
  • Content targeting for informational vs. transactional queries
  • The future role of organic listings in an AI-dominated SERP

In addition to SEO, we are also thinking about the impact of AI Overviews on PPC. With the impact on SEO becoming clearer, PPC ad position/rank may become more important as SEO listings get pushed further down the page. However, similar to SEO, the presence of AI overviews on certain searches could decrease PPC ad visibility, decreasing their effectiveness on certain search terms.

Based on the recent SEO data above, investment in brand awareness activity may become more essential, as building brand authority, trust, and intent becomes more of a key instrument for driving traffic, especially to brand keywords.

Google will also roll out AI Mode over the course of this year, as well as ads in AI overviews, which could further change the landscape.