The Real Value of an AI Overview Click
When an AI Overview appears above the search results, fewer people click through to the sites below it. That part isn’t really in dispute anymore. The open question is about the clicks you still get, and whether they’re better than the ones you lost. At its Search Central Live event in Milan this month, Google made a claim about exactly that, then didn’t bring any numbers to back it up.
Google made the claim again, without the numbers
On stage in Milan, one of Google’s slides said that when people click from an AI Overview, they’re more likely to spend more time on the site. The people who were there caught the obvious problem. The slide came with no absolute numbers and no percentages, only the claim itself.
And it’s not a one-off line, to be fair. The same wording now lives in Google’s official documentation on AI features, which says clicks from pages with AI Overviews are higher quality, meaning users are more likely to stick around. Google has been making this case for almost a year. Back last summer, it published data arguing that total organic clicks from Search have stayed relatively stable, that average click quality has gone up, and that the alarming third-party numbers came from flawed methods or traffic drops that happened before AI features even launched.
So Google’s position is consistent. The catch is that the one figure nobody outside Google can see is the size of this quality bump. Users spend more time on the site, fine. But how much more, and on which kinds of queries? Compared to what baseline? Milan was a chance to put a number on it, and the number didn’t come.
The independent studies tell a harder story
While Google holds its numbers back, outside analysts have published plenty of their own. They point in a less flattering direction, at least on the volume side.
• The SEO data company Ahrefs found that the top-ranking page sees its click-through rate fall by about 58% on queries where an AI Overview appears.
• The Pew Research Center measured click-through dropping from 15% to 8% when an overview is present, and found only around 1% of those searches end in a click on a link inside the overview itself.
• The analytics firm Seer Interactive, tracking the longest run of data, watched organic click-through on AI Overview queries slide from 1.76% down to 0.61% before recovering somewhat early this year.
A caveat belongs with all of these. They’re correlations on specific samples, not proof that the overview itself caused the drop. Queries that trigger an AI Overview tend to be informational, quick-answer questions, the kind that often had weaker click intent to begin with. So some of the gap was probably always there. Even so, three independent datasets pointing the same way is hard to wave off.
Both things can be true
The two sides aren’t as opposed as they look. Google is talking about total clicks across all of Search, every query type added together. The studies are zooming in on one slice, the click-through rate on a single position for the specific queries that trigger an overview. You can lose click-through on those queries and still keep total volume steady, as long as people are running more searches overall and seeing more links per page. Google says both of those are happening.
Traffic is also moving around. Some sites are losing visits while others gain, depending on whether they’re the kind of source these answers reward. So a flat industry average can hide a site that doubled and a site that cratered in the same number. The calm at the aggregate level and the panic at the individual level can both be real at once.
The clicks flow to whoever gets cited
If click-through is dropping on overview queries but the clicks that remain are more engaged, the obvious next question is who gets them. The answer is the sites the overview actually cites.
Seer’s data makes the gap stark. Brands cited inside an AI Overview pull far more organic clicks per impression than the ones left out, by a margin wide enough that citation, rather than raw ranking, starts to look like the thing to chase. And citations don’t come from gaming the format. They come from being the source other credible sites already trust enough to reference, which is the whole point of earned digital PR. You build the standing, and the answer engine reads that standing when it decides who to point at.
There’s a measurement piece too. Google used Milan to confirm that its AI reporting in Search Console is rolling out, separating impressions and clicks from AI Overviews and AI Mode from the rest of your Search data. For the first time you can watch your own overview clicks instead of guessing from someone else’s sample.
Read your own numbers, not the headlines
None of this is as disruptive to the day-to-day as it sounds. Read your own Search Console data once the AI reporting settles, and compare the queries where you’re cited against the ones where an overview ate your click. Work the cited side first, since there’s already a channel open there.
The bigger picture has been steady for a while now. There are fewer easy clicks, and more weight on being the source an answer trusts. That trust gets earned the slow way, through original work and the kind of references that good link building is meant to produce. The brands that read an AI Overview as a reason to earn citations, rather than a reason to panic about lost clicks, are the ones who’ll still be in the answer when the click economics settle.