New Data Suggests AI Overviews Are Reshaping Click-Through Rates by Query Type
By Paul Lovell · February 18, 2026 · 4 min read
The most substantial dataset yet on how AI Overviews affect organic click-through rates comes from Seer Interactive, which has been tracking the same cohort since AI Overviews began appearing at scale. Their latest update covers 53 brands, 5.47 million queries and 2.43 billion impressions from January 2025 through February 2026.
The picture it paints is more nuanced than "AI Overviews killed organic traffic" — and considerably more actionable.
The headline: CTR fell hard, then partially recovered
Seer's September 2025 analysis found organic CTR on queries showing an AI Overview dropped from 1.76% to 0.61% — a 61% decline. That figure drove a lot of the industry alarm through late 2025.
What's changed since is the recovery. CTR on AI Overview queries bottomed out at 1.3% in December 2025 and climbed to 2.4% by February 2026 — an 85% increase in two months.
Two caveats before anyone celebrates. First, this is a recovery from a low point, not a return to pre-AI-Overview levels. Second, a two-month trend is not yet a durable pattern. But the direction is real, and it undercuts the assumption that AI Overview CTR only ever declines.
The finding that actually changes strategy: cited vs uncited
The more useful number is what separates brands cited inside an AI Overview from those that aren't. On the same queries, cited brands earn roughly 120% more organic clicks per impression than uncited brands.
Seer's per-million-impression figures make the stakes concrete:
- Queries with no AI Overview: 33,500 clicks per million impressions
- Cited brands on AI Overview queries: 20,743
- Uncited brands on AI Overview queries: 9,445
Read that carefully, because it reframes the problem. Being cited doesn't restore your pre-AI-Overview click volume — a cited brand still receives well under what the same query used to send. But an uncited brand receives less than a third of it.
The gap between cited and uncited is larger than the gap between cited and no-AI-Overview-at-all. Citation is the variable you can influence; AI Overview presence largely isn't.
Queries without AI Overviews became more valuable
A quieter finding worth noting: CTR on queries without an AI Overview rose from 2.8% in early 2025 to 3.8% by February 2026.
That's a meaningful increase, and the likely explanation is straightforward — as AI Overviews absorb informational demand, the queries that don't trigger them skew toward intents where users genuinely want to visit a site. If a query still returns ten blue links, the clicks on those links are worth more than they used to be.
For content planning, this argues for identifying which of your target queries reliably don't trigger an AI Overview and weighting effort toward them, rather than treating all keywords as equally affected.
What this means for content strategy
- Track AI Overview presence as a segment, not a footnote. Blending AIO and non-AIO queries into one CTR average hides both trends and makes your reporting actively misleading.
- Optimise for citation, not just ranking. Clear definitions, original data, well-labelled sections and direct answers to specific questions are what get pulled into a generated summary. Ranking first without being cited is now a distinctly worse position than it used to be.
- Commercial and transactional content remains comparatively more resilient, since those queries trigger AI Overviews less consistently and users further down the funnel are more likely to want the source.
- Diversify away from top-of-funnel definitional content as a primary traffic source. It's the most exposed category and the recovery data doesn't change that.
A note on what this data isn't
Seer's cohort is 53 brands. It's a large query sample but a narrow brand sample, weighted toward the kind of company that hires an agency to track this. It is the best public dataset available, not a census of the web.
Your own Search Console data — now with generative-AI performance reporting available — is the only source that reflects your actual sites. Use industry data to know what to look for, then verify against your own numbers before acting.