61% of your organic clicks are gone the moment an AI Overview shows up. That’s not a guess, it’s what Seer Interactive found tracking 5.47 million queries for over a year.
Most of what’s written about this treats it as a flat loss. It isn’t. Some pages are getting crushed. Others are quietly gaining traffic they’d never have gotten before. The difference between the two has nothing to do with how well you rank.
Here’s what the data actually shows, and what I’m doing about it for clients right now.
Seer Interactive tracked over 5 million queries across 53 brands from January 2025 through February 2026. Organic CTR on pages where an AI Overview showed up fell from 1.76% to 0.61%. That’s a 61% drop. Ahrefs ran a separate analysis across 300,000 keywords and landed close to the same place, a 58% CTR decline for the page sitting in position one once an AI Overview appears above it.
Pew Research measured actual click behavior on a user panel and found people click through to an organic result 8% of the time when an AI Overview is present, against 15% when it’s not. More than a quarter of people end the search right there.
Who’s actually losing, and who isn’t
This part gets skipped in most GEO content. The damage isn’t evenly spread.
Branded queries are gaining ground under AI Overviews, up around 18.7% by one estimate, because the summary adds context that makes people more likely to click through, not less. Informational, definitional content is where it concentrates.
It’s also not really about ranking anymore. Sites already sitting in the top 10 grew slightly through this shift. The ones getting squeezed hardest sit further down, roughly ranked 100th to 10,000th. Ranking well used to be enough to survive an algorithm change. This time the floor moved under everyone in the middle.
What I’m actually changing for clients.
Two things, not ten:
Building pages that clearly define who a brand is and how it connects to known entities, linked with sameAs schema to Wikidata. This is what makes a brand machine-readable enough to get pulled into an answer instead of buried below one.
Structuring content in Q&A blocks with FAQ and HowTo schema, since that’s the format AI engines lift directly. You can get cited without ranking first. That lever barely existed five years ago.
The part people don’t want to hear
Wil Reynolds at Seer Interactive said his own SEO traffic was down 41%, and instead of chasing it back, his team leaned into what was still working. Newsletter signups were up 65% over the same period, and revenue held flat. Losing search traffic and growing the business aren’t mutually exclusive once you stop treating Google as the only door in.
That’s the conversation I’m having with clients now. Not “how do we get the old traffic back” but “which channel doesn’t depend on Google’s mood.” For some accounts that’s a newsletter. For others it’s Reddit or YouTube. The goal isn’t abandoning SEO, it’s not betting the whole business on one algorithm again.
The part people don’t want to hear
Wil Reynolds at Seer Interactive said his own SEO traffic was down 41%, and instead of chasing it back, his team leaned into what was still working. Newsletter signups were up 65% over the same period, and revenue held flat. Losing search traffic and growing the business aren’t mutually exclusive once you stop treating Google as the only door in.
That’s the conversation I’m having with clients now. Not “how do we get the old traffic back” but “which channel doesn’t depend on Google’s mood.” For some accounts that’s a newsletter. For others it’s Reddit or YouTube. The goal isn’t abandoning SEO, it’s not betting the whole business on one algorithm again.
One thing worth tracking
If Perplexity citations matter to you, know that it weights content freshness harder than almost any other AI engine measured so far, more than Google’s AI Overviews and more than ChatGPT. Independent citation studies put competitive topics somewhere around a 60 to 90 day refresh window before older pages start losing ground. If your best pages haven’t been touched in months, that’s worth fixing before anything else on this list.
If you’re still writing for 2019 Google in 2026, you’re invisible to both Google and the engines replacing it in your reader’s habits.
Farrukh Abdullah
Semantic SEO & GEO Consultant
P.S. If you want your AI search visibility audited, reply to this or visit https://farrukh.top
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