• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer, November 6, 2025

AI Overviews (AIO) seem to significantly affect click-through rates (CTRs) for organic and paid search, but the impact varies based on query type and whether brands receive an AI citation.

Brands earned 35% more organic clicks and 91% more paid clicks compared to those not cited in AIO, although researchers acknowledged that they cannot definitively prove citation causes higher CTRs.

Organic CTR for informational queries featuring Google AI Overviews fell 61% since mid 2024, while paid CTRs on those same queries fell 68%.

Seer Interactive released the findings from its study on Tuesday after analyzing 3,119 informational queries across 42 organizations. The analysis spanned 25.1 million organic impressions and 1.1 million paid impressions from June 2024 through September 2025.

The data is an update from Seer’s January analysis on how Google’s AI Overviews (AIOs) impacted CTR. The data clearly shows that users still search on Google most of the time -- but the impact of that search volume on business has changed. 

Organic CTRs for AI Overviews queries fell from 1.76%, as cited in the January report, to 0.61% in the most recent report.

Paid CTRs fell from 19.7% to 6.34%, respectively. Queries without AI Overviews experienced significant declines, with organic CTRs falling 41% year-over-year (YoY) to 1.62%.

In January 2025, Seer found that organic CTR fell from 1.41% to 0.64% for queries with AI Overviews, while paid CTR dropped across the board regardless of presence in AIO.

With nine months of additional data, the findings show whether those trends have accelerated, stabilized, or reversed, and what that means for search strategies heading into 2026.

Analysts at the company noted in the analysis they could not definitively prove that citation causes higher CTRs. It's possible brands with stronger authority and higher baseline CTRs are simply more likely to be cited by Google's AI. They could state with "confidence" is queries where a company is cited consistently outperform those where they are not.

Analyzing the data from the beginning of the year until now, queries that triggered an AI Overview most recently have consistently shown lower CTRs than non-AIO queries for every month in our analytical date range. The decline continues. The entire report can be found here.