Are AI Overviews Quietly Reshaping Shopping Ad CTR and Impressions?

Shopping ad click-through rates are rising even as impressions fall — a pattern Mike Ryan, head of ecommerce at Smarter Ecommerce, thinks may be connected to how Google is now serving AI Overviews.

The pattern

Ryan had been watching Shopping CTRs climb in Smarter Ecommerce's own Market Observer benchmark data. Separate ecommerce data from Optmyzr showed CTR up roughly 17% year over year, in a similar range to the rise Ryan was already tracking. Rising CTR usually reads as good news — but if impressions are falling at the same time, ads aren't generating more clicks, they're just being shown less often, which pushes the ratio up mechanically.

The theory

Ryan calls it "experience switching." His hypothesis: Google may be more likely to serve an AI Overview for queries with a lower predicted likelihood of an ad click, while preserving Shopping ad placements for searches with stronger click propensity. If true, that would let two things be true at once — AI Overviews suppressing some advertising opportunities, while the Shopping ads Google does still serve keep monetising well.

It's the inverse of the "crocodile effect" already seen in organic SEO, where AI Overviews inflate impressions while gutting clicks. Here, Ryan's data suggests the opposite shape: fewer impressions, comparable or higher clicks.

Why this matters

If Google is routing queries between an AI Overview and a Shopping ad slot based on predicted click value, standard CTR benchmarks stop being a reliable signal of campaign health on their own — a rising CTR could simply mean your ads are appearing on a narrower, more commercial set of queries, not that they're performing better. Worth tracking impression volume and absolute clicks alongside CTR before drawing conclusions from Shopping campaign performance over the next few reporting cycles.

This is one analyst's hypothesis based on benchmark data, not a confirmed Google mechanism — Google hasn't commented on how AI Overview and Shopping ad placement decisions interact.

Sources

• Mike Ryan on LinkedIn — original analysis
• AI Overviews may be affecting Shopping ad CTR and impressions — Search Engine Land