New research from Ahrefs reveals that Google's AI Overviews significantly reduce clicks to websites. Their analysis of 300,000 keywords found that the presence of an AI Overview correlated with a 34.5% lower average clickthrough rate (CTR) for top-ranking pages.

Google's AI overviews drops click rate by 34.5%

The study compared clickthrough rates before and after the US rollout of AI Overviews:

For position one rankings with AI Overviews, CTR dropped from 0.073 in March 2024 to 0.026 in March 2025
For regular informational keywords, CTR fell from 0.056 to 0.031 in the same period

This data directly contradicts Google CEO Sundar Pichai's claim that content within AI Overviews gets "higher clickthrough rates."

Ahrefs' Director of Content Marketing, Ryan Law, notes this isn't surprising as AI Overviews function similarly to Featured Snippets by resolving queries directly in search results. He suggests clicks may reduce further as "the novelty wears off."

Notably, Google still doesn't provide a way to see AI Overview performance separately in Search Console analytics.

Source: Ahrefs: AI Overviews Reduce Clicks by 34.5%

Google's AI Overviews Cut Clicks by 34.5%