How much are AI Overviews actually reducing organic search clicks?

Ahrefs, the SEO analytics vendor, reran a study it first published in April 2025 and found the decline in search clicks has worsened. The earlier study found AI Overviews reduced clicks to top-ranking content by 34.5%. Using December 2025 data, Ahrefs now reports that "the presence of an AI Overview now correlates with a 58% lower average clickthrough rate for the top-ranking page" — meaning, in the company's words, "for every 100 clicks you could historically earn for a top-ranking page, Google now 'keeps' 58."

The methodology: Ahrefs selected 300,000 keywords from its own Keywords Explorer database — 150,000 that trigger an AI Overview and 150,000 informational-intent keywords that do not — and compared aggregated Google Search Console clickthrough rates (clicks divided by impressions) across them. Average position-one CTR for informational (non-AI-Overview) keywords fell from 0.076 in December 2023 to 0.039 in December 2025; for keywords that now trigger an AI Overview, position-one CTR fell from 0.073 to 0.016 over the same period. Ahrefs derives the 58% figure from the gap between a forecasted CTR (based on the non-AI-Overview trend) and the actual CTR for AI Overview keywords. The company frames AI Overviews as the latest in a lineage of Google SERP features — Local Pack, Top Stories, Featured Snippets — that resolve queries without a click, and cites four other firms' estimates (Seer Interactive, Kevin Indig, Authoritas, the Daily Mail) as corroboration, ranging from roughly 47% to 90% lower CTR.

This sits inside the same "knowledge after the web" shift documented from the content-supply side by Has AI-generated content stopped growing on the web?: as AI intermediaries capture more of the clicks that once reached original pages, the economics that funded human-written web content erode, one plausible pressure (among others) toward the AI-generated-content share that Graphite measures on the output side. It also parallels Do readers engage less with AI-generated social media posts? in a narrower sense: both describe audience attention reallocating away from directly engaging original human-authored content, though Medium's gap is between human- and AI-labeled posts on the same platform, not between a page and an AI summary that displaces it.

The excerpt itself hedges its causal language — Ahrefs says presence of an AI Overview "correlates with" lower CTR, even while the surrounding commentary and the post's title assert "reduce." The study does not run a randomized or quasi-experimental test isolating AI Overviews from other confounds (query type, seasonality, general decline in informational search); it compares two keyword sets rather than following the same keywords before and after AI Overview rollout. It also draws entirely on Ahrefs' own keyword database and Search Console sample, from a company whose business is built on organic-search visibility, which doesn't invalidate the finding but is a reason to treat the exact magnitude as directional rather than definitive. What it does establish, repeatedly replicated across its own two studies and corroborated by outside estimates in the same range, is that the direction of the effect — less traffic reaching the ranked page when an AI Overview appears — is robust even if the precise percentage varies by methodology.