AI Overviews and the CTR drop: impressions rise, clicks fall

If your ranking has not changed but your clicks dropped, the problem is not on your site. It is the fact that Google now answers the question right at the top of the results page, before the user reaches the list of links. That broke a relationship that was predictable for years: impressions go up, clicks go up with them. Today it is common to see the two curves split apart, with impressions stable or rising and clicks in steady decline.

In February 2026, Ahrefs updated a study run on 300,000 keywords (150,000 with AI Overview, 150,000 without), comparing the position 1 CTR: it dropped from 7.3% to 1.6%, a 58% decline (ahrefs.com). The same research, first run in April 2025, had found a 34.5% drop: the problem is getting worse, not stabilizing.

The effect does not stop at position 1. On the same 150,000 keywords with AI Overview, position 2 lost 50.8% of its CTR, position 3 dropped 46.4%, position 4 dropped 38.8%, position 5 dropped 32.6%, and position 6 dropped 30.5% (ahrefs.com). In other words: climbing from position 5 to position 2 does not help much if the keyword has an AI Overview, because the CTR loss across that range is similar.

For context: SparkToro estimates that 69% of Google searches already end with no click at all, with or without an AI Overview involved (via conversion.com.br). AI Overview accelerates a trend that already existed. It did not create it from scratch.

The CTR drop is concentrated in informational searches, where the answer fits entirely inside the AI summary. For service providers who live on commercial and local intent ("SEO agency near me," "employment lawyer near me"), the volume of searches with AI Overview tends to be lower, and user behavior changes less, because this kind of search is rarely answered in full inside the summary (phase4.com.br). Before panicking, break your keywords down by intent and check how many of them actually carry an AI Overview today.

The Ahrefs numbers show this drop by position, from most affected to least affected:

This is a recurring question in SEO forums: a page racks up hundreds of thousands of impressions from AI surfaces in Search Console with no clicks attached. Given what the CTR data above shows, that is expected, not a reporting bug. When a page is cited as a source for an AI Overview or an AI Mode answer, it counts as an impression even if the user never actually sees the link, because the citation can appear collapsed, requiring an extra click just to expand the sources before even reaching the link.

It is worth calibrating how you read that number: a high impression count in this context is a sign that the content is being used as a source, which is GEO information (see brand visibility in ChatGPT and Perplexity), not a traffic KPI. Treating the two as the same metric is the root of a lot of the frustration with this report.

Take a page with 10,000 monthly impressions at position 1 for an informational keyword. Without AI Overview, at a reference CTR of 7.3%, that generated around 730 clicks. With AI Overview present and CTR falling to 1.6% (the 58% drop measured by Ahrefs), the same page now generates around 160 clicks, with the same impression volume and the same position. The loss of nearly 570 monthly clicks never shows up in any "what changed on the site" report, because nothing changed on the site. What changed was the user's click behavior in front of the result.

1. Compare two equivalent periods (same day range, year over year or quarter over quarter), filtering by "Web" search type in the Performance report.
2. Split by query type: informational (who, what, how) tends to carry most of the drop; transactional and navigational tend to preserve more clicks.
3. Look for the "Generative AI" report inside Search Console, if it is already available for your property: it shows impressions specific to AI surfaces (AI Overviews, AI Mode), separated from the rest of search. The rollout of this report was gradual by region throughout 2026, so not having it in your account does not necessarily mean zero AI Overview volume. It might just mean it is not available yet.
4. Be suspicious of odd queries in the list: long phrases, written as full questions, sometimes with typos typical of voice input, are often AI assistant prompts showing up as a "query" in the report, not something a person typed.

In practice: do not compare the site's overall CTR month to month without segmenting by query type. A site with half its traffic on informational queries will show a much bigger average CTR drop than a mostly transactional site, even with identical technical performance.

If the old goal was "increase organic clicks," it needs company now. Metrics that still make sense when clicks fall but visibility does not:

• Leads or sales that came from organic search, regardless of how many total clicks it took to get there.
• Brand presence in AI answers, covered in the article on brand visibility in ChatGPT and Perplexity.
• Direct and branded traffic, which tends to grow when AI mentions the company name without generating an immediate click, but plants the recall.

// real case: the CTR drop we tracked internally reached 76%. It is an almost direct correlation: when the AI snippet gains strength, clicks plummet.

The most common objection is "but my position hasn't changed, why did traffic drop." The honest answer has three parts: traditional ranking position is still relevant, but it stopped being the only factor that determines clicks; Google is absorbing part of the research process inside the result itself; and this affects the whole market, it is not a problem specific to the client's site. Showing the Ahrefs data helps move the conversation out of the emotional register and onto a comparable market benchmark.

Before drawing conclusions about the whole site, segment the last 16 weeks of Search Console by query type. If the CTR drop is concentrated in informational queries, the problem is of a different nature, and so is the conversation with the client. This article is part of the pillar GEO in practice: how to get crawled, understood, and cited by AI search engines.