Key insights:
· CTR drops significantly:
o Ahrefs found that the #1 organic result loses about 34.5% of its CTR when AI Overviews appear (analysis of 300K keywords).
o Amsive reported an average CTR decline of 15.49%, with drops up to 37% when AI Overviews appear with featured snippets.
· Non-branded keywords are most affected:
AI Overviews appear mostly for informational searches, causing CTR declines of up to ~20% on non-branded queries.
· Lower rankings suffer more:
Pages ranked outside the top 3 see CTR decreases of around 27% because AI Overviews push organic results further down the page.
· Branded searches behave differently:
AI Overviews appear rarely (about 4.79%) for branded queries, but when they do, CTR can increase by about 18.68% due to strong brand intent.
Overall takeaway:
AI-driven search features are reducing total organic clicks, and many high-ranking websites in traditional results are not being included in AI Overviews, changing how SEO traffic is distributed.