Google AI Overviews CTR shows early signs of recovery: Study

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

What strikes CTR. When an AI Overview seems, pages cited in it get extra clicks than pages on that very same outcomes web page that aren’t cited. However each nonetheless get fewer clicks than searches with no AI Overview:

• No AI Overview: ~3.3% CTR
• AI Overview with quotation: ~2.1% CTR
• AI Overview with out quotation: ~0.9% CTR

The place clicks are shifting. Searches with out AI Overviews are getting extra worthwhile. CTR on these queries elevated from 2.8% in early 2025 to three.8% by February 2026.

• One purpose: AI Overviews deal with fast solutions. The customers who nonetheless click on by are searching for extra.

AI Overviews differ by question intent. AI Overviews present up erratically throughout question varieties:

• Informational: ~36% present AIOs
• Transactional: ~5%
• Comparability: ~95%
• Query: ~86%

Sure, however. Decrease CTR doesn’t at all times imply worse outcomes. In some circumstances, clicks stayed flat whereas impressions grew. This implies manufacturers might have appeared in additional AI Overviews at the same time as CTR dropped.

Paid search is much extra secure. When Google confirmed an AI Overview, paid CTR rose barely 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 simply lowering clicks — they’re redistributing them, sending extra visitors to websites they cite and much much less to these they don’t. Which means that you must get featured in AI Overviews and likewise focus extra on searches the place folks click on.

Concerning the knowledge. Seer studied 53 manufacturers, 5.47 million queries, and a pair of.43 billion impressions from January 2025 to February 2026.

The report. AIO Impact on Google CTR: 2026 Update

#Google #Overviews #CTR #reveals #early #indicators #restoration #Research