In January 2025, Google AI Overviews appeared in 6.49% of search results. By March, that number hit 13.14%. It doubled in two months. That data comes from Semrush and seoClarity's joint research, and it tells a clear story: AI Overviews are expanding fast, and the trajectory points toward 30% of searches by the end of 2025.
This post covers what the data actually says, which queries and industries are most affected, and what you can do to protect (and grow) your organic traffic.
The CTR impact is severe, but specific
When an AI Overview appears on a search results page, clicks drop across the board. The Semrush/seoClarity data breaks it down:
Organic CTR drops 61% when an AI Overview is present
Paid CTR drops 68% when an AI Overview is present
The top organic result loses 79% of its CTR when an AI Overview sits above it
Those are significant numbers. A page ranking #1 that normally gets, say, 30% CTR might see that fall to around 6% when an AI Overview appears above it. For sites that depend on ranking #1 for high-volume informational queries, this is a structural problem, not a temporary fluctuation.
But here's the part most coverage misses: these drops are concentrated in specific query types.
88% of AI Overview queries are informational
Semrush and seoClarity found that 88.1% of queries triggering AI Overviews are informational. Think "what is," "how does," "why do" type questions. These are the queries where Google has the most confidence in generating a synthesised answer.
Transactional queries ("buy," "pricing," "sign up"), navigational queries (brand name searches), and complex commercial queries ("best CRM for small teams 2026") trigger AI Overviews far less frequently. If your organic traffic is weighted toward these query types, the AI Overview impact on your site is smaller than the headline numbers suggest.
This matters for strategy. The response shouldn't be "SEO is broken." It should be "which of my pages are exposed, and what do I do about them?"
The silver lining: cited brands win
Here's the most actionable finding in the Semrush/seoClarity research: brands that get cited as a source within AI Overviews earn 35% more organic clicks than brands that don't appear in the AI Overview at all.
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That's counterintuitive. You'd expect that any AI Overview would reduce clicks for everyone. But when your brand is specifically named as a source in the AI-generated answer, users are more likely to click through to your site. The citation acts as a trust signal.
This creates a new optimization target. It's no longer just about ranking #1 in the traditional blue links. It's about being the source Google's AI pulls from and cites.
Which content gets cited in AI Overviews
AI Overviews don't just randomly select sources. The content that gets cited tends to share specific characteristics:
Original data and research. Pages that contain unique statistics, survey results, or proprietary analysis are cited more frequently than pages that simply restate information available elsewhere. Google's AI needs authoritative sources to ground its answers.
Clear, structured definitions. When a page opens with a concise, well-written definition of a concept, AI Overviews are more likely to pull from it. Think of how Wikipedia structures its opening paragraphs.
Expert-authored content with visible credentials. Pages with clear author bylines, author bio pages, and visible expertise signals get cited more often. This aligns with Google's E-E-A-T framework (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness).
Well-structured HTML. Proper heading hierarchy, schema markup, descriptive subheadings, and logical content flow make it easier for Google's systems to extract and cite specific passages. You can check your page structure with a schema validator.
Freshness. For topics where recency matters, recently updated content with current dates gets priority. AI Overviews tend to cite pages that reflect the latest information.
How to check your AI Overview exposure
Before changing your strategy, measure where you stand.
Step 1: Identify your informational keywords. These are the most exposed. If 88.1% of AI Overview queries are informational, start by listing every informational keyword you rank for.
Step 2: Check which ones trigger AI Overviews. Google these queries manually (in an incognito window) or use tools that track AI Overview presence. Note whether your site appears as a citation.
Step 3: Measure the traffic impact. Compare year-over-year organic traffic to your informational pages. Semrush data shows non-news publishers saw a 14% YoY search traffic decline on average, with the median publisher down 10%. If your informational pages are declining faster than that, AI Overviews are likely a factor.
Step 4: Assess your citation rate. For queries where AI Overviews appear, how often is your content cited as a source? This is your new KPI.
Our AI readiness tool automates much of this assessment, scoring your pages on the factors that correlate with AI Overview citation.
Five strategies for the AI Overview era
1. Pursue AI Overview citations, not just rankings
Traditional SEO asked: "How do I rank #1?" AI Overview SEO asks: "How do I become the source Google's AI cites?" These are related but different goals. A page can rank #3 in the blue links but be the primary cited source in the AI Overview, and that citation drives more traffic than the #3 ranking alone.
Focus your optimization on the content characteristics listed above: original data, clear definitions, expert authorship, clean structure.
If 88.1% of AI Overview queries are informational, the inverse is your opportunity. Commercial investigation queries, comparison queries, and transactional queries are less affected. Rebalance your content calendar toward these query types.
This doesn't mean abandoning informational content. It means being strategic about which informational content you invest in. Prioritise complex informational queries that AI Overviews handle poorly: multi-step processes, nuanced topics with legitimate disagreement, and questions that require recent context.
3. Create content AI can't easily synthesise
A blog post answering "What is schema markup?" is easy for an AI Overview to summarise. An interactive tool that validates your schema markup is not. A page listing "10 SEO tips" is extractable. A detailed case study with custom charts and specific client data is harder to compress into a paragraph.
Content that requires interaction, visual understanding, or sequential engagement is structurally resistant to AI extraction. Build more of it.
4. Strengthen your entity presence
Google's AI needs to know who you are as an entity (a brand, an organisation, a person) to cite you confidently. That means: claiming and maintaining your Google Business Profile, building a Knowledge Panel if you don't have one, ensuring consistent NAP (name, address, phone) across the web, and publishing content with clear authorship tied to real people with verifiable credentials.
The stronger your entity profile, the more likely Google's AI is to cite you as a trustworthy source.
5. Monitor and adapt continuously
AI Overviews are evolving quickly. They doubled in prevalence in two months, and Google is actively testing different formats, citation styles, and query types. What triggers an AI Overview today might not trigger one next month, and vice versa.
Set up monitoring for your key queries. Track citation rates, not just rankings. Use tools like our SEO analyzer to catch changes in how your pages interact with Google's AI features.
What this means for paid search
The 68% paid CTR drop when AI Overviews are present deserves its own mention. If you're running Google Ads on informational queries, your cost per click is rising as CTR falls. The math gets worse as AI Overviews expand.
The practical response: shift paid budgets toward transactional and commercial queries where AI Overviews are less prevalent, and test whether brand campaigns (which target navigational queries) maintain their efficiency.
The trajectory
Google has not slowed down. AI Overviews went from 6.49% to 13.14% in two months, and projections from Semrush and seoClarity put them at 30% of searches by end of 2025. Meanwhile, US organic click rates fell from 44.2% to 40.3% year over year (SparkToro/Datos, 2025), and zero-click searches hit 58.5%.
These trends are connected. AI Overviews are one of several forces compressing organic clicks. The others include expanded SERP features, Knowledge Panels, and Google's own products (Maps, Shopping, Flights) consuming clicks that used to go to websites.
The SEO teams that thrive will be the ones that adapt their measurement, their content strategy, and their keyword targeting to this new reality. Some teams are already exploring AI agents for SEO to automate parts of this adaptation. For a broader look at how to reshape your SEO approach for what comes next, read our guide on SEO strategy for 2026.
