A little over a year ago, the introduction of AI Overviews (AIO, for short) by Google was not simply an enhancement of how search results were presented; it represented a significant upheaval for the digital marketing industry and, in particular, for search engine optimization (SEO). Google’s promise was to offer concise and direct answers generated by artificial intelligence, displayed at the very top of the SERP, while continuing to channel traffic to websites.
However, this naturally raised a pressing concern for brands and content creators: if users could obtain the answer directly from Google, why would they click on an organic result? Why would they choose to visit my content, regardless of how prominently it appeared in the results?
For years, the primary SEO objective for any content creator had been to achieve the top organic ranking. Yet, AIOs not only displaced these results, but they also fundamentally changed user intent, transforming the search process from a navigational portal to a tool for generating answers. How would this affect websites that rely on Google traffic as part of their business model?
Now, with 15 months of concrete data compiled by Seer Interactive, the answer is clear: the initial concern was justified, but the impact has proven to be even more complex than anticipated.
Seer’s analysis, which covers data gathered from June 2024 to September 2025 and reviews millions of impressions across various search queries, confirms the damage inflicted on CTR.
On the organic front, the trend indicates a steep decline for queries where an AIO is present. Starting from a CTR of 1.76% in June 2024, the click-through rate dropped by almost two-thirds, stabilizing at 0.61% by September 2025, after hitting a low of 0.57% in July. This 61% reduction demonstrates that AIOs are indeed fulfilling their purpose of resolving user needs without requiring them to visit a website.
However, the most alarming scenario emerges in the CTR for paid results. Ads for these queries with AIOs began with a CTR of 19.70% in June 2024 but suffered an even more dramatic decline, with an overall decrease of 68%. The most concerning moment occurred during July 2025, when paid CTR fell to just 3.26%. Although a slight recovery followed the summer, this volatility highlights the instability of the current environment. For advertisers, these figures serve as a serious wake-up call.
According to the study’s data, for queries where an AIO was present and the brand was not cited, organic CTR plummeted by 65.2% year-over-year. This drove the average CTR down to 0.52%. Furthermore, paid content also suffered: the paid CTR dropped by 78.4%.
The study also makes it clear that being cited by Google’s AI Overview has become a strategic necessity. Brands that were cited experienced a significantly smaller drop in CTR and superior performance: citation is associated with a 35% higher organic CTR and a 91% higher paid CTR compared to not being cited at all. In any case, the study explicitly warns that it cannot establish causality between these factors, since it may simply be the case that brands with higher authority are cited more frequently.
Another of the study’s most noteworthy findings is that the CTR crisis is not limited to queries containing AIOs. Seer Interactive refuted its own initial hypothesis by demonstrating that queries without AIOs have not become a safe haven, but are also experiencing a decline. Organic CTR for these queries fell by 41% during the analyzed period, settling at 1.62% in September 2025.
This finding is essential because it suggests that the problem is broader than simply the appearance of Google’s AI. According to the study’s authors, users—particularly for informational queries—may be migrating away from Google or using the SERP differently. They are seeking fast, direct answers via large language models (LLM) such as ChatGPT or Perplexity, or turning to social platforms. Google continues to be the starting point, but the willingness to click on traditional results has decreased dramatically across the web.
The study also revealed an insight regarding the causality of AIOs: Google’s AI tends to appear in queries that have historically generated fewer clicks. In other words, AIOs are intensifying a pre-existing pattern of low CTR in informational searches, rather than arbitrarily eliminating high-performing results.
The final point from Seer Interactive is that marketing professionals must stop expecting a recovery in CTR. The digital landscape has changed, and it appears to have done so permanently. The solution is not to try to evade AIOs, but to change the KPI. The metric can no longer be simply traffic acquisition, but rather “visibility share” and “citation rate” within AIOs. Therefore, SEO strategy must, by necessity, become a strategy of authority and AI-driven visibility, where optimization focuses on becoming the trusted source that Google must cite—redefining what it means to “win” in the age of artificial intelligence.
Image: Gemini
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