The Shift
AI Overviews: what still gets the click
Not all traffic is dying at the same rate. Knowing which queries survive AI Overviews tells you exactly where to spend — and where to stop.
The mistake publishers make with AI Overviews is treating the damage as uniform. It isn’t. Overviews gut some query types and barely scratch others, and that uneven map is the most useful planning tool you have right now.
The damage, measured
Where an AI Overview appears, the click-through rate for top-ranking pages dropped about 58%, and zero-click rates climb past 80% (
Search Engine Journal). Position-one CTR fell from roughly 7.3% to 1.6%. But the averages hide the real story — which queries you’re competing for matters far more than the average.
Crushed
- Definitional ("what is")
- Quick facts & conversions
- Thin explainers
Resilient
- Branded & navigational
- Transactional / "near me"
- Interactive tools
- First-party data & opinion
What gets crushed
- “What is” / definitional queries — CTR has fallen by roughly 60%+. The Overview is the answer.
- Simple how-to and quick facts — unit conversions, dates, one-line answers.
- Thin, undifferentiated explainers — the exact pages AI can reproduce instantly.
If your traffic was built on these, that’s where the bleeding is.
What still gets the click
- Branded and “near-me”/transactional queries — branded queries with an AI Overview have actually seen CTR rise. People who want a specific source or want to do something still click.
- Interactive tools — an Overview can describe a calculator; it can’t run yours. (Ours: the ad-network qualifier.)
- First-party data and experiments — numbers only you have.
- Opinion, analysis, and recommendations with a stance — “which should I pick, and why.”
- Deep comparisons and buying decisions — where readers want to weigh options themselves.
What to do with the map
- Stop producing thin informational pages for traffic. They feed the Overview, not you.
- Reframe informational content for citations, not clicks — structure it to be quoted (see GEO for publishers).
- Shift effort to the resilient categories — tools, data, opinion, transactional.
- Build the brand so more of your demand arrives as branded search, the one segment trending up.
The open web didn’t end; it got pickier about which pages deserve a visit. Pages that carry something an AI can’t summarize in two paragraphs still earn the click — and now they have less competition.
FAQ
- How much do AI Overviews reduce clicks?
- A lot, but unevenly. Click-through rate for top results fell about 58% where AI Overviews appear, and zero-click rates reach 80%+ on those queries. Informational 'what is' and 'definition' queries are hit hardest, while branded and transactional queries are far more resilient.
- Which content is safest from AI Overviews?
- Content where the answer isn't the whole point: interactive tools, first-party data and experiments, strong opinion and analysis, transactional and comparison pages where people want to act, and branded destinations people seek out by name.
- Should I stop writing informational content?
- Not entirely — informational content still earns AI citations and builds authority. But thin explainer pages whose only value is the answer are no longer worth producing for traffic. Add a proprietary input (data, a tool, a viewpoint) or skip it.