By Jack Hattori-Flowers

AI Overviews Are Killing Click-Through Rates – What Your Digital Marketing Agency Should Do About It

If your organic click-through rate has dropped while your rankings have stayed steady, you’re not imagining it. AI Overviews are now absorbing a meaningful share of clicks that used to reach even the top-ranked organic result, and the right response isn’t panic – it’s a genuinely different strategy from your digital marketing agency.

What’s Actually Happening

Independent research from groups including Ahrefs and AirOps has found that when an AI Overview appears on a search results page, the historical #1 organic position can lose more than half the clicks it would previously have received. The searcher gets their answer directly on the page, and the click that used to go to your website simply doesn’t happen. This isn’t a temporary dip. It’s a structural change in how a growing share of searches now resolve.

Why ‘Just Rank Higher’ Isn’t the Fix Anymore

  • Ranking #1 no longer guarantees the click it once did, because the AI Overview sits above it and answers the question directly
  • A growing share of searches end without any click at all, regardless of where you rank
  • Being cited inside the AI Overview itself is now a separate, additional goal, not a natural side effect of ranking well

What a Digital Marketing Agency Should Actually Be Doing About This

The right response isn’t to abandon SEO – it’s to treat visibility and conversion as two separate problems that both need solving. This is exactly the thinking behind pairing our SEO & AI Search Visibility framework with a genuine look at conversion performance, rather than treating rankings as the only metric that matters.

  • Structure content to be answer-first, increasing the odds of being the source an AI Overview actually cites
  • Diversify traffic sources so organic search isn’t the only channel carrying the business, since its behaviour is shifting under everyone
  • Improve what happens after the click you do get, since fewer total clicks makes each one worth more
  • Track zero-click impressions and citation appearances as their own metric inside a broader Pipeline Growth view of performance, not just rankings and click-through rate in isolation

seo team

What This Means for Budget Conversations

This shift also changes how marketing budget itself should be justified internally. A finance team looking purely at click volume and cost-per-click will see a channel that appears to be underperforming, even when the underlying visibility and brand presence are actually holding up well. Reframing the conversation around total visibility – rankings, AI citations, and conversion together – gives a far more accurate picture of whether the investment is working, rather than judging it against a click-volume benchmark that the market itself has moved away from.

This matters particularly for businesses reporting results up to a board or ownership group that isn’t necessarily following the details of how search behaviour has changed. Without that context, a genuinely healthy marketing program can look, on the surface, like it’s underperforming – simply because the metric being used to judge it hasn’t been updated to reflect how people actually search now.

The Businesses Handling This Well

The businesses adapting fastest are treating this as a genuine strategic shift rather than a temporary Google update to wait out. They’re investing in the content structure and technical foundations that earn AI citations, while also tightening up conversion on the traffic they do still receive, so a smaller number of clicks still delivers the same commercial result.

How to Measure This Properly

The mistake most businesses make when reviewing this decline is looking at click-through rate in isolation, disconnected from what’s actually happening on the results page for their specific queries. A more useful approach tracks three things together: whether an AI Overview is appearing for your priority keywords, whether your rankings for those keywords have genuinely changed, and whether your click-through rate has moved independently of those rankings. When rankings are stable but click-through rate has dropped, and an AI Overview has started appearing where it didn’t before, that’s a clear enough signal to act on rather than dismiss as normal fluctuation.

Most standard SEO reporting doesn’t surface this connection automatically, which is exactly why it gets missed for months at a time. Building AI Overview presence into standard reporting, alongside the usual rank tracking, is one of the simplest changes that makes this pattern visible – which is part of what sits behind our own Pipeline Growth reporting approach.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is this happening across all industries, or just some?

It’s most pronounced on informational and comparison-style queries, where an AI Overview can fully answer the question without a click. Highly commercial, local, or transactional queries are affected less, though the trend is moving in the same direction across the board.

Should I stop investing in SEO if clicks are dropping anyway?

No – SEO is still the foundation both traditional rankings and AI citations are built on. The investment needs to expand to include AEO-specific work, not be abandoned.

How do I find out if this is affecting my business specifically?

The clearest signal is a gap between stable rankings and declining click-through rate or traffic over the same period – that combination is worth investigating rather than dismissing as normal variation.

Ready to Talk?

If that gap sounds familiar in your own reporting, it’s worth confirming what’s actually driving it before assuming the worst or ignoring it.

Get in touch with our team and we can look at whether that pattern shows up in your own data.

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