Google AI Overviews CTR shows early signs of recovery: Study

/dans
AI data

After bottoming out at 1.3% in December 2025, the click-through rate (CTR) on Google’s AI Overviews climbed to 2.4% in February 2026. That’s an 85% jump in two months, according to new data from Seer Interactive.

What moves CTR. When an AI Overview appears, pages cited in it get more clicks than pages on that same results page that aren’t cited. But both still get fewer clicks than searches with no AI Overview:

  • No AI Overview: ~3.3% CTR
  • AI Overview with citation: ~2.1% CTR
  • AI Overview without citation: ~0.9% CTR

Where clicks are shifting. Searches without AI Overviews are getting more valuable. CTR on those queries increased from 2.8% in early 2025 to 3.8% by February 2026.

  • One reason: AI Overviews handle quick answers. The users who still click through are looking for more.

AI Overviews vary by query intent. AI Overviews show up unevenly across query types:

  • Informational: ~36% show AIOs
  • Transactional: ~5%
  • Comparison: ~95%
  • Question: ~86%

Yes, but. Lower CTR doesn’t always mean worse results. In some cases, clicks stayed flat while impressions grew. This suggests brands may have appeared in more AI Overviews even as CTR dropped.

Paid search is far more stable. When Google showed an AI Overview, paid CTR rose slightly from 14.6% to 16.2%. When it didn’t, CTR fell from 26% to 21.8%.

Why we care. Google’s AI Overviews aren’t just reducing clicks — they’re redistributing them, sending more traffic to sites they cite and far less to those they don’t. That means you need to get featured in AI Overviews and also focus more on searches where people click.

About the data. Seer studied 53 brands, 5.47 million queries, and 2.43 billion impressions from January 2025 to February 2026.

The report. AIO Impact on Google CTR: 2026 Update