Rankings unchanged, impressions up, clicks down. That is the most common pattern of 2026, and in most cases the cause is the same: an AI Overview now sits above the organic results and answers the question before the user ever reaches your link.
Here is what the research shows, which queries took the hardest hit, and what can realistically be done about it.
How many queries are affected
| Query type | Share showing an AI Overview |
| Comparisons ("X vs Y") | around 95% |
| Questions ("how", "why", "what is") | around 86% |
| Informational overall | around 36% |
| Transactional ("buy", "order") | around 5% |
| All US queries | over 20% |
Figures from Seer Interactive across a sample of 49,353 queries. The conclusion is immediate: the damage landed on informational content, while commercial queries are barely touched. Your blog dropped; your service pages did not.
What happened to CTR
The same Seer Interactive tracking (53 brands, 5.47 million queries, 2.43 billion impressions) found CTR on AI Overview queries fell by roughly 60%. But the headline number matters less than the split beneath it:
| Situation | CTR |
| No AI Overview present | around 3.3% |
| Overview present, you are cited | around 2.1% |
| Overview present, you are not cited | around 0.9% |
Being cited does not restore traffic to its former level, but it preserves more than twice as much as being left out. On these queries that is the only real strategy available.
For context: the share of US searches ending without any click rose to roughly 68% in early 2026, against 60% two years earlier (SparkToro / Similarweb).
The big shift: ranking no longer guarantees citation
This is the defining change of the year. Ahrefs analysis of 863,000 keywords and 4 million URLs found that only 38% of pages cited in AI Overviews rank in the organic top 10. In mid-2025 the figure was 76%.
What that means in practice: a top-3 position is no longer a ticket into the AI block, and a page sitting on the second results page can genuinely appear there. The selection criterion moved from position to structure and completeness of the answer.
Five things to actually do
1. Confirm AI Overviews are the cause
Pull the queries in Search Console where impressions are flat or rising while clicks fall. Run 30–50 of them manually and check whether an AI block appears. This filters out the cases where something else entirely is going on.
2. Rewrite page openings for extraction
Around 44% of citations come from the first third of a page. The formula: question in the heading, a direct one or two sentence answer immediately below, detail after that.
3. Reinforce the commercial layer
Transactional queries are affected at 5% against 86% for question-form queries. If your traffic was predominantly informational, moving part of the effort toward commercial-intent pages is sound — search still behaves conventionally there.
4. Offer what the AI block cannot
An AI Overview gives a compressed, generalised answer. People click through when they need what the model does not summarise: calculators, prices, specific case numbers, detailed comparison tables, real photographs. That is the reason to click.
5. Widen your channels
YouTube accounts for about 5.6% of all AI Overview citations and grew 34% in six months. Video, email, communities and referrals have stopped being supplementary — they now compensate for what search took away.
What not to do
Blocking Google-Extended hoping to "get clicks back". It will not remove you from AI Overviews or restore traffic, and it can harm your citation prospects.
Cutting articles down to answer length. A compressed page covers fewer sub-questions and loses more often to a competitor with fuller material.
Abandoning informational content. It still builds recognition and earns citations — its metric simply shifted from sessions to presence in answers.
Frequently asked questions
Can I opt out of appearing in an AI Overview?
Technically there are directives such as nosnippet and max-snippet that limit how your text is used. They also cut your ordinary search snippets, so the cost usually exceeds the benefit.
Why is a lower-ranking competitor cited when we are not?
Because position is no longer decisive. Look at the structure of their page: is there a direct answer up top, are the sections self-contained, is there markup and a recent date.
How long does it take to get back into the block after changes?
Usually weeks — Google has to recrawl and re-evaluate the page. Pages that are already crawled frequently respond fastest.
Are impressions worth counting if the clicks are gone?
Partly. A brand mention inside an answer builds recognition and returns later as branded queries. But impressions do not substitute for traffic — they are different metrics.
Does this affect every market equally?
No. Coverage is highest on English-language informational queries and lower elsewhere, but the direction of travel has been consistent everywhere.
Next steps
The on-site actions are collected in our GEO checklist for ChatGPT and Perplexity, the technical groundwork in Schema.org and llms.txt for AI search, and measurement in how to measure AI search traffic in GA4. For the wider picture, see SEO in 2026 and AI search.
We handle this systematically through AI SEO and SEO services — get in touch via contact Top Team.
