AI Overviews are cutting clicks by 38%. Here's what still earns the visit.

Right, let's talk about the number that's been doing the rounds this week, because it's a big one.

A new field study, covered by Search Engine Journal, looked at what actually happens when Google shows an AI Overview at the top of the results. The headline: where an AI Overview appears, outbound organic clicks drop by 38%. Take the Overview away and clicks jump from 0.38 to 0.61 per search. On those same queries, zero-click searches climbed from 54% to 72%.

In plain English: nearly three quarters of the time, people are getting their answer and never leaving Google.

I've had a few conversations with clients lately that all start the same way. "Oli, our rankings are steady, so why is traffic down?" This is the answer. You can hold position one and still lose the click, because Google is answering the question before anyone reaches you. It's not a penalty. It's the results page doing a different job than it used to.

Why this isn't the disaster it sounds like

Here's where I part ways with a lot of the doom-and-gloom takes.

Yes, the click is worth less than it was. But being the source Google trusts enough to quote is worth a great deal more. When your content is the thing feeding that AI Overview, you're in front of the customer at the exact moment they're forming a view, whether they click or not. That's brand, that's authority, and it's the thing your competitors are mostly ignoring while they panic about traffic charts.

The old game was ranking a page. The new game is being cited. Get comfortable with that and the whole thing gets a lot less scary.

What actually earns the visit now

So if a third-plus of your clicks are quietly disappearing into an answer box, what's left worth optimising for? A few things we're focusing on for clients right now.

Be the source, not just a result. AI Overviews pull from content that's clear, well-structured and genuinely useful. That means answering the real question directly, near the top, in language a person would actually use. Bury your answer under 600 words of preamble and you won't get quoted.

Give it structure it can read. Clean headings, proper schema, a sensible page structure, direct question-and-answer formatting. You're not writing for a crawler any more, you're writing for a model that's deciding whether your page is the clearest answer available. Make its job easy.

Earn clicks the Overview can't satisfy. Some queries can be answered in two lines. Those clicks are gone, and chasing them is a waste. The clicks still worth having are the ones an AI summary can't finish for you: the buying decision, the comparison, the "which one is right for my business", the thing that needs your tools, your pricing, your people. Weight your content towards those.

Build the brand searches. Here's the quiet winner. When someone reads an AI Overview and then searches for you by name, that click is yours and it converts. The more you show up as a trusted source, the more branded demand you create. Being cited feeds the searches that AI can't intercept.

Watch the right numbers. If you're still judging SEO purely on organic sessions, you're measuring the one thing that's structurally falling. Look at impressions, branded search, assisted conversions and, increasingly, whether you're being mentioned in AI answers at all. The story is more complicated than one line on a traffic graph, and the clients who get that are the ones making calm decisions instead of panicked ones.

The bottom line

AI Overviews aren't going anywhere, and the 38% figure is only going to matter more as they spread across more queries. The brands that win from here aren't the ones fighting to claw back every lost click. They're the ones making sure that when Google, or ChatGPT, or Copilot answers the question, it's their name in the answer.

That's the work. It's a shift, not a crisis, and it plays to exactly the kind of clear, genuinely helpful content good brands should have been making all along.

If you want a straight look at whether your site is set up to be cited rather than just ranked, that's exactly the sort of thing we do at Clicky. Give us a shout.

Clicky™ / ClickyGroup™

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Draft note: the 38% figure and the 54% to 72% zero-click shift come from a January to February 2026 field study reported by Search Engine Journal. Worth a final check against the primary source before publishing. Verify: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/ai-overviews-cut-organic-clicks-38-field-study-finds/573145/