How Does Being Cited in an AI Overview Affect Click-Through Rates?

Three independent studies confirm the pattern suggested by Seer Interactive’s data. 

The Pew Research Center tracked 68,879 searches by 900 U.S. adults and found results with an AI summary produced a click 8% of the time versus 15% without one. Ahrefs studied 300,000 keywords and found overviews correlated with a 34.5% lower click-through rate in April 2025, then 58% lower when they repeated the study in February 2026. 

The trend line shows how the drop in CTR nearly doubled in under a year, which suggests that users are learning to read the overview and stop. The summary that Google assembles from your content is, for a growing share of searches, the only thing anyone reads.

That changes who loses clicks, and how many they lose. If your page ranks well for a query that now triggers an overview, your impressions may hold steady while your clicks fall, because Search Console counts an overview impression the same as any other impression. 

Which raises the question, “How do you advertise effectively online when overviews are the new default?”

Position Inside the Overview Decides Who Gets the Click

In September 2025, Search Engine Land published an analysis of 20,000 ranking queries. They found that being the first citation in an AI overview delivered a click volume comparable to the sixth organic position. Being the fifth citation in an overview was comparable to being “on the 10th page of Google’s search results.” 

Pew’s data reinforces the scale problem: clicks on source links inside the summary itself accounted for just 1% of all visits where an AI summary appeared. 

Because Google Search Console doesn’t tell you which citation slot you capture, position reporting becomes a real problem. Overview impressions are bundled into the same count as every other impression, so a page that slides from the second citation to the fifth will appear to have flat impressions but a falling click-through rate.

The risk is assuming the problem is content quality and completely rewriting the page, when the page wasn’t the issue.

Tracking where your page sits in the list of citations in an overview takes either a rank tracker that captures overview markup or an analyst to run your priority queries on a schedule and log the citation order by hand. 

Fewer Clicks Can Still Mean More Value

In conversion data published by Ahrefs in June 2025, AI search accounted for 0.5% of visits over a 30 day window and produced 12.1% of signups, a conversion rate roughly 23 times its organic average.

Later that month, Ahrefs published a second study covering about 82,000 websites, and engagement figures pointed the other way. AI-referred visitors averaged 4.0 pages per session against 5.2 for search visitors, and they bounced at 67.8% against 63.7%. Ahrefs asked whether AI-referred traffic is better quality and answered, “from a user behavior perspective, not quite.”

That both of these findings come from the same company within the same month suggests an interesting explanation. AI referred visitors arrive on your page having already read a summary. They land, read one page, and either convert or leave. 

That behavior produces a high bounce rate and a high conversion rate at the same time.

It also changes which pages are worth having cited. A page that offers little more than a definition that AI can easily summarize in full doesn’t give a user a reason to come to your page or convert. 

A page that documents how you measured something, what your sample was, and where your method fails isn’t easily compressed into a summary. That citation gives the reader a reason to click and keep reading. 

Sorting your existing content library by how compressible each page is can help you reorder your roadmap.

How To Tell if Citation Is Paying Off

Before you set a benchmark, consider that in the months between December 2025 and February 2026, Seer’s monthly series showed click-through rates bottoming out at 1.31% and then recovering to 2.36%. 

The effect of AI overviews on click-through rates has been volatile. Users are still learning to use the new tools, and their behavior keeps shifting. At the same time, the tools themselves are being updated periodically, giving users different value over time.

Four changes to your reporting will tell you more than any published study.

1. Compare your cited pages against your own overview-free queries, not against what those pages earned before overviews existed. Google began rolling out AI overviews in the U.S. in May 2024, so any baseline from earlier describes a SERP that is gone.
2. Track where you appear in the list of citations. Appearing early in the list of citations has a dramatic impact on click-through rates, and Search Console doesn’t report it for you.
3. Report conversion quality rather than sessions. Conversion rate on AI-referred visits and branded search volume both sit in tools you already have, and both will show value that a sessions chart hides.
4. Add a “How did you hear about us” field to your conversion forms. That answer comes from the customer rather than a platform, and it is the only place where someone can tell you if they found your organization from an AI citation.

Citation rate and slot position are lead measures your team can move within a sprint, while conversion and branded demand are the lag measures that leadership funds. Reporting both together ties the day-to-day work to the outcomes that justify the budget. 

Auditing Your Citation Performance

Most teams can see that they’re being cited but can’t tell whether those citations are driving clicks or just inflating impressions. A 321 Web Marketing GEO citation and CTR audit maps your slots, click quality, and downstream conversions, then shows you where to focus.