What to Do When AI Overviews Take Your Clicks
Amit Malvi
Founder, SearchAxe. Former Senior SEO Manager, Invideo AI
Published Updated 10 min read
Quick answer
What to do when AI Overviews take your clicks: confirm the cause in Search Console first. Steady impressions and position with a falling click-through rate on question queries is the signature. Then sort queries by intent, rewrite the pages that should be cited inside the overview, move effort toward comparison, integration and branded demand that overviews rarely touch, and report impressions, citations and pipeline instead of clicks alone.
On this page
- What to do when AI Overviews take your clicks, in five steps
- How do you confirm AI Overviews are the cause of lost clicks?
- Which queries lose the most clicks to AI Overviews?
- Does getting cited inside the AI Overview win clicks back?
- Where should you move effort when informational clicks fall?
- How should you track impressions versus clicks now?
- Should you opt out of AI Overviews to get clicks back?
- When are lost clicks not worth fighting for?
Key takeaways
- Ahrefs found an AI Overview correlated with a 58% lower click-through rate for the top-ranking page in December 2025.
- The signature in Search Console is steady impressions and position with a falling CTR, mostly on question and how-to queries.
- Being cited helps but does not restore the old click: Seer found cited brands earned 35% more organic clicks than uncited ones on overview queries.
- Buying-stage queries are the safest ground, with overviews on 4.3% of commercial and 2.1% of transactional keywords in Ahrefs' data.
- Search Console's generative AI report shows impressions only, so pair it with clicks, Bing's AI Performance report and pipeline data.
When AI Overviews take your clicks, the loss is usually concentrated on question and how-to queries, not spread evenly across the site. If you lead growth at a seed to Series B software company and your informational pages show steady impressions but falling clicks in Search Console, this is for you. You confirm that AI Overviews are the cause, find which queries are affected, try to be cited inside the overview where it matters, and move effort to the queries overviews rarely touch. Then you change what you report, so a click line no longer decides whether SEO looks like it is working.
What to do when AI Overviews take your clicks, in five steps
Work through five steps in order: confirm the cause, segment the affected queries, get cited where citations are worth having, shift effort to buying-stage and branded demand, and rebuild reporting around impressions, citations and pipeline. Do not skip the first step, because not every lost click is an AI Overview.
How do you confirm AI Overviews are the cause of lost clicks?
Look for falling click-through rate while impressions and average position hold steady on the same queries. A ranking loss shows up as a drop in position. An AI Overview shows up as the same position earning fewer clicks. You can check this in Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools without paid tools.
A quick diagnosis in Search Console and Bing
- Compare like with likeIn Search Console's Performance report, compare the last three months with the same three months a year earlier, so seasonality does not mislead you.
- Split queries by intentUse a query regex filter to separate question queries (how, what, why, best way) from commercial ones (alternatives, vs, pricing) and from branded ones.
- Read the signatureIf impressions and position are flat but CTR fell, the results page changed. If position fell, you have a ranking problem, and the AI Overview is not the first thing to fix.
- Confirm the overview existsSearch the top queries in a signed-out browser, and open the generative AI performance report to see which of your URLs received impressions in AI features.
- Check Bing as a controlCompare the same queries in Bing Webmaster Tools. If Bing holds while Google falls at the same positions, that points to a change on Google's results page rather than on your page.
- Check what the lost clicks were worthIn GA4, look at signups or demo requests from the affected landing pages. A click drop on a page that never converted is a different problem from the same drop on your best page.
One caution on position. Because Search Console counts an AI Overview as a single position and gives every link inside it that position, a page cited in a top overview can show a better average position than its blue link earns. Click-through rate is also falling even without overviews: Seer Interactive's November 2025 study found organic CTR on informational queries with no overview fell 41% between June 2024 and September 2025.
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Schedule a Free ConsultationWhich queries lose the most clicks to AI Overviews?
Informational queries where your page ranks near the top lose the most. Ahrefs found the drop was largest at position one and shrank further down the page, and Ahrefs' trigger study found overviews on 57.9% of question queries and 46.4% of queries with seven or more words. Queries that a short answer fully resolves lose most of all.
| Position | Click-through rate impact |
|---|---|
| 1 | -58.0% |
| 2 | -50.8% |
| 3 | -46.4% |
| 4 | -38.8% |
| 5 | -32.6% |
| 6 | -30.5% |
| 7 | -29.7% |
| 8 | -28.8% |
| 9 | -29.7% |
| 10 | -19.4% |
Behaviour data points the same way. Pew Research Center's July 2025 analysis of real browsing found users clicked a traditional result on 8% of visits to pages with an AI summary, against 15% without one, and ended their browsing session on 26% of those pages against 16%. Google itself says that for quick-answer questions such as “when is the next full moon”, people may not click further.
For a SaaS site, that usually means glossary pages, “what is” explainers and generic how-to posts take the hit, while comparison, integration, pricing and signup pages barely move. Look at your own split before assuming either way.
Does getting cited inside the AI Overview win clicks back?
Partly. Seer found that on queries with an AI Overview, brands that were cited earned 35% more organic clicks and 91% more paid clicks than when they were not cited. Seer is clear that it cannot prove citation causes the lift, since stronger brands may simply be cited more often. Either way, a cited page's click-through rate was still down 49.4% year over year in Seer's Q3 2025 data, against 65.2% for uncited pages.
Citation also has value beyond the click. Pew found users clicked a link inside the AI summary itself on just 1% of visits, but the summary names sources and brands to everyone who reads it. For a page worth defending, rewrite the section the overview draws on so it answers the question in its first two sentences, using our guide on how to rank in Google AI Overviews. To see why a ranking page gets passed over, read how Google AI Overviews choose which sources to cite.
Where should you move effort when informational clicks fall?
Move it toward queries closer to a purchase and toward demand for your brand. In Ahrefs' data, AI Overviews appeared on 4.3% of commercial, 2.1% of transactional and 13.1% of branded keywords, against 57.9% of question queries. Those are the searches where the blue link still gets the click and where the visitor is already evaluating tools.
- Comparison and alternatives pages for the competitors buyers name on sales calls.
- Integration pages for each tool you connect to, stating what syncs and what does not.
- Use-case pages written for one role or industry, with the constraints that rule you in or out.
- Pricing and plan pages with limits stated in text, so AI answers repeat the right numbers.
- Brand demand through mentions in reviews, roundups and communities, so buyers who see you named in an AI answer search for you next.
Do not simply move the budget to paid search on the same informational queries. Seer found paid click-through rate on overview queries where the brand was not cited fell 78.4% year over year in Q3 2025. The click loss is about the results page, not about organic specifically. Our guide to a SaaS SEO strategy built on signups instead of traffic covers how to prioritise buying-stage pages.
How should you track impressions versus clicks now?
Track impressions and citations as visibility, clicks as traffic, and signups as the outcome, and stop treating clicks as a proxy for all three. Search Console's generative AI performance report, available to all sites since August 31, 2026, shows impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode by page, country, device and date, but no clicks. Google also says clicks from results pages with overviews tend to be higher quality, so watch conversion rate as clicks fall.
| Metric | Where to get it | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Clicks, impressions and CTR by query group | Search Console Performance report, Web search type | Which intent groups lost clicks and which held |
| Impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode | Search Console generative AI performance report | Which pages Google's AI answers link to, and the trend |
| Citations and grounding queries in Copilot and Bing | Bing Webmaster Tools AI Performance | Which pages Microsoft's AI answers cite, and for what |
| Citations on your key prompts | A fixed monthly manual check or a tracking tool | Whether you are named, and who is named instead |
| Branded search impressions | Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools | Whether being named in AI answers creates demand |
| Signups and demos from organic landing pages | GA4 conversions | Whether the remaining clicks still turn into pipeline |
Bing's AI Performance report, launched in February 2026, shows total citations, cited pages and grounding queries across Copilot and Bing's AI summaries. For the GA4 side, see tracking AI search referral traffic in GA4, and for a cross-engine view, measuring AI search visibility for a SaaS company.
Should you opt out of AI Overviews to get clicks back?
Almost never, for a SaaS company. Search Console's Search generative AI control, rolled out to all sites on August 31, 2026, can remove a site from AI Overviews, AI Mode and generative AI features in Discover, and Google says an excluded site gets no traffic or impressions from them, while content from other sites still appears there.
So opting out removes your name from the answer without removing the answer. Google says the control is not a ranking signal for the rest of Search, and changes take a few days to apply. Using nosnippet instead is worse: Google's preview controls govern its regular listings as well as its AI formats, so nosnippet also strips the snippet from your normal result. Opting out makes sense mainly for publishers whose content is the product, which is rarely true of a software company.
When are lost clicks not worth fighting for?
When the query had no buying intent and the overview answers it completely. A definition of a general concept, a quick fact or a formula was never going to turn into a signup, and the clicks it used to send were often the least valuable on the site. Let those pages keep earning impressions and citations, stop counting their traffic as a goal, and spend the time on the pages that sit closer to a decision.
Google's AI answers are also one place buyers research among several. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode and Copilot each send some traffic and cite different pages. Defending cited pages and rebuilding buying-stage pages are both part of Google AI Overviews and AI Mode optimization, and how to rank in Google AI Mode covers the other Google surface.
Frequently asked questions
Why are my impressions up but clicks down in Search Console?
The most common cause on informational queries is an AI Overview or another answer feature appearing above your result. Your page is still shown, so impressions hold or rise, but fewer people click. Check whether average position held steady on the same queries. If it did, the results page changed rather than your ranking. If position fell too, treat it as a ranking problem first.
Does Search Console show clicks from AI Overviews?
Clicks on links inside AI Overviews count in the normal Performance report under the Web search type, mixed in with other clicks. The generative AI performance report, available to all sites since August 31, 2026, shows impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode by page, country, device and date, but it does not report clicks. Google also assigns every link in an overview the same position.
How much traffic do AI Overviews take?
It depends on the query and position. Ahrefs found an AI Overview correlated with a 58% lower click-through rate for the top-ranking page in December 2025, and a 19.4% lower rate at position ten. Seer measured organic CTR on informational queries with overviews falling 61% between June 2024 and September 2025. Commercial and transactional queries are affected far less, because overviews rarely appear on them.
Will blocking AI Overviews bring my clicks back?
Usually not. Search Console's Search generative AI control can exclude your site from AI Overviews and AI Mode, but Google says content from other sites still appears in those features and may look similar to yours. You lose the citation and brand exposure while the answer stays on the page. For a SaaS company, improving which pages get cited and shifting effort to buying-stage queries is the better trade.
