A Calgary law firm we audited last year ranked #1 for "commercial lease dispute lawyer Alberta." Their click-through rate on that keyword dropped 43% between January and October 2025 without losing a single ranking position. The culprit was a blue box they'd never asked for, sitting above their listing, answering the searcher's question before they ever reached the link.
That box is Google's AI Overview. And it's rewriting the economics of organic search.
What AI Overviews Actually Are (and Aren't)
AI Overviews are AI-generated summary panels that appear at the top of certain Google search results. They pull information from multiple indexed pages, synthesize an answer, and display it with small citation links to the sources used. Google introduced them broadly in May 2024 and has been expanding their reach ever since.
They're not featured snippets. Featured snippets extract a passage from a single page and credit that page prominently. AI Overviews blend content from several sources into a single generated answer, and the citation links are small, tucked at the bottom, easy to miss.
They're also not consistent. Google has been adjusting how often they appear. According to Semrush's 10-million-keyword study, AI Overview visibility peaked in mid-2025, then pulled back. The appearance rate varies wildly depending on query type, industry, and intent. The data is volatile enough that anyone quoting a single percentage is oversimplifying.
What we can say with confidence: AI Overviews now appear on a meaningful share of informational searches, and that share is growing for certain verticals.
The Click-Through Rate Problem
Here's where the numbers start to sting.
Ahrefs analysed 300,000 keywords in December 2025, comparing click-through rates for queries with AI Overviews against those without. The result: a 58% reduction in organic CTR for the top-ranking page when an AI Overview was present. That's up from their earlier April 2025 finding of 34.5%.
Pew Research Center ran an independent behavioural study tracking 68,879 unique Google searches from 900 U.S. adults. Users who saw an AI-generated summary clicked on a result 8% of the time. Users who didn't see one clicked 15% of the time. The most striking stat: only 1% of searches with an AI Overview resulted in someone clicking one of the cited source links within the summary itself.
Half your potential clicks can vanish without your rankings changing at all. Position one doesn't mean what it meant two years ago.
Seer Interactive's research corroborates this with organic CTR drops between 49% and 65%, depending on the query category. Even the Daily Mail reported seeing 80-90% lower CTR on affected queries.
Google disputes these findings. They've publicly challenged the Pew study's methods and maintain that AI Overviews drive meaningful traffic to publishers. We've seen both sides in our own client data. Some pages have held steady. Others have cratered. The difference comes down to query type and content strategy — which is where the actionable part begins.
Which Queries Trigger AI Overviews (and Which Don't)
Not every search gets an AI Overview. Understanding which queries trigger them helps you figure out where you're exposed and where you're safe.
Informational queries are the primary target. Semrush found that nearly nine in 10 queries triggering AI Overviews had informational intent. "What is" questions, "how to" guides, definition-type searches — these are where Google's AI feels most confident generating a summary.
Longer queries trigger them more often. Single-word searches activate AI Overviews only about 9.5% of the time. Queries with seven or more words trigger them 46.4% of the time. Question-format queries ("how do I...", "what's the best...") appear at 57.9%, while non-question queries sit around 15.5%.
Local queries are mostly safe — for now. AI Overviews show on only about 7% of local searches. That's significant for businesses in Calgary and elsewhere whose traffic depends on "near me" and city-specific queries. Google's local pack and Maps integration still dominate those results. But the 7% figure is a moving target, and Local Falcon's research shows that when AI Overviews do appear for local queries, they don't use the same distance-based ranking that the local pack relies on.
Transactional and shopping queries are largely unaffected. Shopping queries trigger AI Overviews only 3.2% of the time — the lowest rate in Semrush's dataset. If your traffic comes primarily from people ready to buy, you're less exposed than a publisher answering informational questions.
The verticals hit hardest: Science (26%), Computers & Electronics (18%), and People & Society (17%) lead all categories. Health content has seen enormous growth in AI Overview coverage. News and sports lag behind average — Google seems cautious about summarizing time-sensitive content.
The shift isn't just about frequency, either. Navigational queries — people searching for a specific brand or site — grew from under 1% of AI Overview triggers in January 2025 to over 10% by November. Google is expanding the types of searches it feels comfortable summarizing.
How to Protect Your Traffic (and Capture AI Overview Citations)
We won't pretend there's a magic fix. Some traffic loss from AI Overviews is structural — Google is keeping more users on the search results page, full stop. But there's a real difference between sites that bleed traffic quietly and sites that adapt their content strategy to this new reality.
Structure content for extraction. Google's AI systems pull from pages that are easy to parse. That means clear heading hierarchies (H2s and H3s that accurately describe subsection content), concise opening answers followed by deeper explanation, and HTML elements like lists, tables, and definition structures. The official Google Search Central guidance says there are "no additional technical requirements" to appear in AI Overviews beyond being indexed and eligible for snippets. That's technically true. It's also like saying there are no additional requirements to win a race beyond showing up — the execution matters enormously.
Get your structured data right. Research from BrightEdge found that pages with schema markup are three times more likely to appear as cited sources in AI Overviews. Our structured data guide for local businesses covers the implementation details, but the short version: Article schema, FAQ schema, HowTo schema, and LocalBusiness schema all help Google's AI systems understand your content's purpose and authority. Pages with FAQPage markup specifically are 3.2x more likely to show up in AI Overview citations compared to pages without it.
Build topical depth, not isolated pages. AI Overviews use a technique Google calls "query fan-out" — the system issues multiple related searches across subtopics to build its response. Sites that cover a subject thoroughly across multiple interlinked pages have more entry points for this fan-out process. A single blog post answering one question is less useful to Google's AI than a cluster of five or six pages covering a topic from different angles and linking to each other. This is why we emphasise content strategies built around AI search patterns rather than keyword-by-keyword targeting.
Create content that can't be summarized away. This is the strategic shift that matters most. If your page's entire value is a factual answer — "What temperature do you bake salmon at?" — an AI Overview can absorb that completely. The searcher never needs to visit your site. But if your content includes original data, proprietary analysis, expert opinion, interactive tools, detailed case studies, or local-specific knowledge that an AI can't fully replicate in a paragraph, people still have a reason to click through. The sites we've seen maintain their traffic are the ones producing content that AI can reference but can't replace.
Maintain strong E-E-A-T signals. Experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness. Google's own documentation on AI features in search repeatedly references these quality signals. Real author credentials, genuine experience markers, original research, and verifiable business information all influence whether your content gets cited. This connects directly to how AI assistants select which businesses to recommend — the same trust signals that matter for ChatGPT and Perplexity matter for Google's AI Overviews.
Track what's actually happening to your queries. Google Search Console won't tell you which of your impressions included an AI Overview. Tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, and SE Ranking now track AI Overview presence for specific keywords. If you're seeing impressions hold steady while clicks decline, AI Overviews are the likely culprit. We run this analysis monthly for clients and adjust content strategy based on which queries are being cannibalized.
AI Overview Survival Checklist
- Audit your top 20 traffic-driving keywords for AI Overview presence using Semrush, Ahrefs, or SE Ranking
- Identify which pages are purely informational — these are your highest-risk assets
- Add structured data (Article, FAQ, HowTo, LocalBusiness schema) to every key page
- Restructure content so each section opens with a direct answer, then expands with depth and original insight
- Build topic clusters — interlink related pages to give Google's query fan-out more to work with
- Create uncopyable value — original research, local expertise, interactive tools, case studies
- Strengthen E-E-A-T signals — real author bios, verifiable credentials, consistent entity information
- Monitor monthly — track CTR trends in Search Console and compare against AI Overview keyword data
- Diversify traffic sources — email lists, direct traffic, social referrals reduce dependence on any single search channel
What This Means for Small Businesses
There's a silver lining buried in the data, and it's worth mentioning without overstating it.
Local businesses in Calgary and similar markets are less exposed than national publishers and informational sites. The 7% AI Overview rate on local queries means most "plumber near me" and "Calgary web developer" searches still work the way they always have. Your Google Business Profile, local citations, and review signals still drive the local pack. We covered how to strengthen those signals with structured data for local businesses — that guide is more relevant now than when we wrote it.
Traffic quality may actually improve for some businesses. When an AI Overview answers a casual informational query, the people who still click through tend to have stronger intent. They want something the summary didn't provide. For service businesses, that often means they're closer to a buying decision.
But ignoring the trend would be a mistake. Google is expanding AI Overviews into more query types. Navigational queries are growing. Commercial queries, while still low at 8.7% of AI Overview triggers, are rising. The window to adapt your content strategy is now, while the changes are gradual — not later, when they're unavoidable.
The businesses that come through this shift in good shape won't be the ones who gamed an algorithm. They'll be the ones who built genuine authority, structured their content for machines and humans alike, and created something worth clicking on even when the summary was free.
Need help assessing how AI Overviews are affecting your search traffic? Our AI search and structured data services include keyword-level AI Overview analysis and content strategy adjustments. Start with a free assessment to see where your site stands.
Sources
- Ahrefs — Update: AI Overviews Reduce Clicks by 58% (December 2025)
- Pew Research Center — Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears (July 2025)
- Semrush — AI Overviews Study: What 2025 SEO Data Tells Us About Google's Search Shift (2025)
- Google Search Central — AI Features and Your Website
- Google Search Central — Top ways to ensure your content performs well in Google's AI experiences on Search (May 2025)
- Search Engine Journal — Pew Research Confirms Google AI Overviews Is Eroding Web Ecosystem (2025)
- BrightEdge — Structured Data in the AI Search Era
- Local Falcon — The Impact of Google AI Overviews on Local Business Search Visibility (2025)
- Seer Interactive — AIO Impact on Google CTR: September 2025 Update (September 2025)
- Search Engine Land — Google AI Overviews surged in 2025, then pulled back (2025)