Key Takeaways
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AI-generated summaries, otherwise known as AI Overviews, now appear in nearly 50% of SERPs, especially for informational queries.
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Click-through rates (CTR) have plunged: position 1 pages lose 30–70% of potential clicks when AI Overviews are present.
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Industries like news, travel, and publishing are seeing severe traffic drops even from high-ranking pages.
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Agencies must optimize for AI visibility (via strategies like AEO, GEO, and structured, authoritative content) to minimize traffic losses and retain influence.
What’s Happening: The Rise of AI Overviews in SERPs
AI Overviews are concise, AI-generated summaries positioned prominently at the top of Google search results. Often longer than featured snippets, these answers extract insights from multiple sources and significantly reduce the need for users to click through to websites.
Currently, AI Overviews appear in about 47% of SERPs, up from just 25% in late 2024.
Traffic Is Plummeting Even From Top-Ranked Pages
Multiple studies reveal alarming drops in traffic due to this trend:
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CTR for the top organic result drops by 34.5% when AI Overviews are present. Sites report overall losses ranging from 15% to 70%, depending on industry and query type.
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Media outlets have been hit especially hard. Some publishers report up to 80% declines in referral traffic when their links appear below AI Overviews.
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Digital Content Next members, including major news brands, experienced 10% median YoY drops, with some domains seeing up to 25% losses over just eight weeks.
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Businesses like Business Insider, HuffPost, and The Washington Post have seen traffic fall by ~50% from 2022 to 2025.
Why CTR Is Dropping So Sharply
Recent research, including a Pew study, indicates that users who see an AI summary click on traditional links only 8% of the time, compared to 15% when no AI snippet is present. What’s more, 26% of sessions end right on the search page meaning users leave without clicking anything.
That means even #1 ranked pages often lose visibility if AI Overviews serve the answer first.
Examples by Industry
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Media & Publishing: Major media sites are experiencing 50 – 80% traffic losses. Publishers are scrambling to diversify into newsletters, events, and branded platforms.
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General Publishers: Conductor and others report that AI Overviews are reducing conversions and not just traffic for publishers, which is harming monetization strategies.
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Consumer Verticals: Travel, lifestyle, DIY, and food bloggers have reported losses of up to 70% in top-page traffic due to informational queries being answered before users scroll.
How Agencies Can Adapt: Strategies for the AI-Overviews Era
1. Optimize for AI Visibility, Not Just Rankings
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Use FAQ or HowTo schema, concise answers, and optimized structure so content is “AI-friendly”
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Create content that’s educational, trustworthy, and citation-worthy so it can be surfaced effectively by AI Overviews
2. Embrace Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) & GEO
AEO focuses on crafting content as direct, conversational answers which is ideal for AI. GEO goes further – creating content that AI is likely to cite due to trust signals and entity associations.
3. Expand Channel Strategy
Don’t rely solely on traditional search. Invest in newsletters, social platforms, and community building to reach users directly and reduce traffic reliance on Google.
4. Track AI Visibility Metrics
Use SEO tools and manual tests to spot keywords triggering AI Overviews and track whether your content appears in them.
Final Thoughts
AI Overviews aren’t just changing search, they’re redefining visibility.
If your agency or clients are noticing click drops despite healthy rankings, it’s not a glitch. It’s a feature of modern search.
The solution? Evolve.
Now is the time to optimize content for AI discovery, diversify visibility beyond Google SEO, and become the agency that understands how being seen doesn’t always mean being clicked.
