Do AI Overviews steal your clicks? The math, position by position
For twenty years, the deal was simple: rank higher, get more clicks, in a curve everyone could roughly agree on. AI Overviews broke the curve — not by moving your ranking, but by answering the question above it.
What the data shows
Published click-through studies since AI Overviews rolled out broadly converge on an uncomfortable range: when an Overview appears for a query, organic results below it lose roughly 40–60% of their expected clicks. Your position didn’t change. Your traffic did.
The effect isn’t uniform. Informational queries (“how does X work”) trigger Overviews most and suffer most; transactional and navigational queries less so. Which means two #3 rankings can now be worth wildly different amounts of traffic depending on what sits above them.
Run your own numbers
Take any keyword you rank for, plug the position and search volume into our free CTR & AI Overview estimator, and flip the “AI Overview appears” toggle. That before/after number is the conversation to have with whoever owns your content budget.
The strategic response (it’s not despair)
- Know which of your keywords trigger Overviews. A #1 ranking under an Overview and a #1 ranking without one are different assets. (Asheard flags this per keyword automatically.)
- Get cited inside the Overview. If the answer box is eating the clicks, be the source the answer box quotes — direct answers high on the page, clean structure, quotable sentences.
- Track the second battlefield. The same shift is happening inside ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini, without any search results page at all. Visibility there is measurable too — that’s exactly what Asheard tracks.
The clicks didn’t vanish. They moved one layer up. Go where they went.