Measuring AI Overview's Actual Click-Through Impact on Our Content

Instead of taking the industry's word for how badly AI Overviews are hurting organic CTR, we isolated a set of 60 queries where our client's pages ranked top-5, split them by whether an AI Overview appeared, and tracked click-through rate across both groups for a full quarter.

The queries with an AI Overview present showed an average CTR drop of about 22% compared to the group without one, for pages at the same ranking position. That's real and worth taking seriously. It's also a lot less catastrophic than the 'organic search is dying' framing that gets repeated constantly.

The part that mattered more than the average

The drop wasn't uniform. Purely definitional queries — 'what is X' — took the biggest hit, averaging closer to 35% CTR loss, because the overview fully answers them and there's little reason to click through. Comparison and 'best X for Y' queries barely moved, because the overview can summarize options but can't actually make the decision for the user.

Query type         | Avg CTR change with AI Overview present
Definitional        | -35%
How-to (short)       | -28%
Comparison/"best X"  | -6%
Transactional        | -4%

AI Overviews aren't killing clicks evenly. They're killing clicks on questions that never needed a website in the first place.

What we changed

We stopped prioritizing pure definitional content for this client's roadmap, since that traffic is the most exposed, and shifted budget toward comparison and decision-support content, which held up. The panic about AI Overviews is real where it applies, but applying it as a blanket assumption across all content types means you'll overcorrect on the content that was never your biggest risk.