[IN THE NEWS]
AI
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NOVEMBER 4, 2025 — Search Engine Land featured our latest analysis of how AI Overviews impact Google click-through rates (CTR) across organic and paid. Like many in the SEO space, we're keeping a close eye on how AI is affecting digital marketing efforts — and how numbers appear to be falling drastically across the board.
What We Found
Our findings showed a 61% decrease in organic click-through rates for queries with AI Overviews — and a similar phenomenon across paid click-through rates (which fell 68%). Click-through rates also fell 41% on queries that don't show AI Overviews, suggesting broader changes in user behavior. This analysis was performed on a subset of our original data study and included 3.1k+ queries across 42 client organizations.
The Bigger Picture
As Search Engine Land notes, this research aligns with trends that other leaders such as HubSpot are seeing, including drastic declines like that infamous 80% drop in HubSpot traffic earlier this year. We've been tracking our AI Overviews data for 15 months, and the trend lines show no signs of stability — suggesting that users are changing how and where they ask questions, both in Google and in LLMs.
Our Take: What This Means for Your Strategy
If you've been waiting for things to settle down or for CTRs to bounce back, the data is telling you to stop waiting. This is the new baseline, and it's likely to continue with similar volatility.
Our latest findings showed a critical difference from our hypothesis back in January: "Queries without AI Overviews are NOT increasing in CTR, they're just declining slower. While they still outperform AIO queries significantly (1.62% vs 0.61% organic CTR), they've lost 41% of their click-through rate year-over-year when comparing September 2025 to September 2024."
So how can you apply these insights to your digital marketing efforts? Build your 2026 strategy around the assumption that CTRs for high-funnel queries will be 20-30% lower than today, assuming the current 6-month decline rate continues. Re-evaluate your KPIs, diversify your spend, and question your traditional paid strategy.
Resources:
Read the full post from Search Engine Land: Google AI Drives 61% Drop in Organic CTR, 68% in Paid
See our most recent findings on AI Overviews: AIO Impact on Google CTR: September 2025 Update
PPC Land also published a version of the Search Engine Land article: Google AI Overviews Reduce Organic Traffic 61%, Paid Traffic 68%
This Seer study was also cited in a stats roundup by Position Digital: 90+ AI SEO Statistics for 2025