Lyndon Antcliff retweetledi
AI Overviews don’t create clicks they kill them.
According to data from Ahrefs and Amsive
Ahrefs (300,000 keywords):
-34.5% drop in CTR for position 1 when AI Overviews are present
Focused on informational intent keywords (99.2% overlap with AI Overviews)
Amsive (700,000 keywords):
-15.49% average CTR drop across all keywords
- 37.04% CTR drop when AI Overviews + featured snippets appear together
-19.98% CTR decline on non-branded keywords
-27.04% CTR drop for keywords ranking outside the Top 3
Only 4.79% of branded keywords trigger AI Overviews, but those that do saw a +18.68% CTR boost
AI Overviews are disproportionately harming non-branded, informational queries, while branded queries see less disruption (and in rare cases, a CTR boost).
So based on that,
Let’s cut the nonsense AIOs are built on scraping and rehashing other people’s work.
It’s content theft at scale because you are using SOMEONES work to provide an answer without returning the click.
Whilst technically it's NOT scraping, it borders a VERY grey area (because they do provide a link to the source)
The very thing Google told webmasters not to do for decades, they’re now doing themselves
Google’s stance for publishers:
Google’s spam and helpful content policies stress that websites must create original, valuable, experience-driven content, not thin summaries or regurgitations. They explicitly discourage content that is “stitched together” or “rephrased” without adding real insight.
What AI Overviews do:
AIOs pull content from multiple sources, repackage that information, and serve it back to the user as a “new” answer. While citations may be shown, the visible content itself is essentially a Google generated digest, not the original publisher’s work.
So this is clearly contradictory.
And don’t kid yourself that “it’s just informational clicks” Those clicks used to build brand awareness, shape perception, and spark consideration before purchase. That’s where businesses lost visibility and revenue
Google search console does NOT report AIO data even though it SHOULD be shown as a search appearance item. Whilst this COULD change in the future along with AI mode data right now, AIO data is unavailable, all we see are site owners/SEOs sharing crocodile graphs
Every audit tells the same story AIOs do not send more clicks
COMPENSATION STRATEGY?
You need MORE high quality content that's of sheer value to the end user (not just text, but video, tools etc) to offset the lost clicks - if you are a publisher obviously this is going to be challenging
So as SEOs we should switch to compensatory strategies where we maximise high quality content generation but also ensure we cull off anything dead, we use our new content and get it out over social media, create videos to go with post content and get them onto Youtube, Vimeo, Insta Shorts, TikTok
Whilst the SEO industry HAS been impacted by AIOs, we should merely adapt our strategies accordingly
English
