The folks at Seer put together a study looking at how the click-through rates of the Google organic and paid search results are impacted by having AI Overviews on the page. And the short answer is, AI Overviews seem to be hurting the click-through rates in a big way.
Look at this chart:
The study looked at about 10,000 keywords to only include those ranking in the top 20 positions with informational intent. They used both Google Ads and Google Search Console data, with Ziptie data to see when an AI Overview was displayed for that query.
There is one caveat to this data, "When clients show up in AIO Organic CTR rises from 0.74% to 1.02%, paid CTR also increases from 7.89 to 11%," they noticed.
CTRs when AI Overviews show up on Google are at an all time low, both on Paid and Organic.
— Wil Reynolds (@wilreynolds) February 4, 2025
When they don't show up, we're in good shape with those CTRs growing.
Check out our analysis of our client data over 12 months.https://t.co/ggU2eoGVg2 pic.twitter.com/f9e4Ps1aBp
Now, Glenn Gabe was able to kinda find a loophole to track AI Overviews data. Here are the CTR data for AI Overviews in this specific site:
GSC data for AI overviews is nearly impossible to view... UNTIL NOW. But there's a catch. You need a manual action :) -> The Twiddler That Didn’t Twiddle – How To Track Clicks and Click Through Rate For Google’s AI Overviews (if you have a manual action)
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) January 28, 2025
In my post, I explain… pic.twitter.com/6dNqkInsny
Both their posts go into way more detail - but I wanted to highlight these two reports because they are super helpful to understand.
Forum discussion at X.
