What AI Overviews Are Doing to Organic Traffic, and How Leadership Should Respond

Organic search has long been one of the cheapest sources of qualified pipeline a company owns. Google's AI Overviews change the economics of that channel, because the search results page now answers many questions before anyone visits a website. For a CMO or CFO, the question is no longer whether this affects traffic. It is how much, on which queries, and what to do with the budget that depended on those clicks.

What the independent data shows

Three findings are worth knowing before any planning conversation.

• Clicks fall when a summary appears. Pew Research Center tracked the browsing of 900 US adults in March 2025. When a Google search produced an AI summary, users clicked a traditional result in 8% of visits, against 15% when there was no summary. Only 1% of visits to those pages included a click on a link inside the summary itself.
• The top position loses the most. Ahrefs compared 300,000 keywords before and after the US rollout and found that an AI Overview was associated with a 34.5% lower average click-through rate for the page ranking first.
• The feature reaches a very large audience. Alphabet chief executive Sundar Pichai said on the company's second-quarter 2025 earnings call that AI Overviews has 2 billion monthly users.

None of this means organic search has stopped working. In the Pew study, 18% of searches produced an AI summary, so most queries still returned a traditional page of results. The impact is concentrated, and the first job is finding out where it is concentrated for your business.

Why the impact is uneven

AI Overviews appear most often on informational queries: definitions, comparisons and how-to questions. Those are often the top-of-funnel pages that marketing teams built to attract early research. Transactional and branded searches, where a buyer is looking for a specific supplier or ready to act, are less exposed.

That distinction matters for planning. A drop in sessions on glossary and guide content is a different business problem from a drop in sessions on service and pricing pages. The first changes how you measure awareness. The second affects pipeline directly.

Questions to put to your team

Before approving new spend or cutting old spend, ask for answers to these:

1. Which queries lost clicks, and do they show an AI Overview? Search Console shows impressions, clicks and position by query. Google's own documentation confirms that traffic from AI Overviews is counted inside the standard Web search report, so the data is already there.
2. Did impressions hold while clicks fell? That pattern usually means the page is still visible but the answer is being given on the results page. It is a different problem from losing rankings.
3. What share of organic leads came from the affected pages? If informational pages produced few conversions, the traffic loss may matter less than the headline number suggests.
4. Are we appearing in the summaries for our priority topics? A manual check of your most valuable queries, done monthly, gives a baseline before you buy any tracking tool.

What to change, and what to leave alone

Keep the fundamentals. Google states that there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews, and that no special schema or new machine-readable file is needed. The pages that get cited are, in practice, pages that already rank and answer the question clearly. Treat any proposal that depends on a secret format with caution.

Rebalance the content plan toward decision-stage pages. Comparisons, pricing explanations, implementation guides and case evidence answer questions a summary cannot settle on its own. They also tend to convert.

Make the answer easy to find on the page. Put the direct answer near the top of each section, then the detail and evidence. This helps human readers and makes the page a clearer candidate for citation.

Adjust targets before the next budget cycle. If your organic targets assume last year's click-through rates on informational queries, they are likely to be missed for reasons that have nothing to do with execution. Reset them by page type so the team is judged on the pages it can still move.

How to report it to the board

A simple monthly view is enough to start: organic clicks and impressions split into informational, commercial and branded queries, organic-sourced leads and revenue, and a short note on visibility in AI summaries for a fixed list of priority queries. That separates a channel problem from a measurement problem, which is usually the first thing a CFO asks.

If you want an outside view of where AI Overviews are affecting your organic pipeline, our SEO team can run the query-level analysis with you.

Related reading: From Rankings to Citations: Why Your 2026 SEO Strategy Must Shift to Answer Engine Optimization | The Five Analytics Metrics Your CMO Actually Cares About