--- title: "Google's AI answers reducing search traffic by 40%" description: "Google's AI answers are taking clicks from websites in the search results. A randomized experiment now puts a number on it: when researchers hid AI Overviews from US desktop users, the searches that would have shown one drew far more clicks, implying the Overviews cut clicks through to outside websites by about 40%. Those Overviews now appear on more than half the US keywords DataForSEO tracks, up from 6% two years ago. The industry's answer, GEO (generative engine optimization), has yet to show a way to compensate for the loss. While AI citations correlate with the same kind of link profile that goes with higher Google rankings, in March AI assistants sent websites just 0.3% of their traffic." url: "https://revscope.co/blog/search-seo-geo-2026/" --- # Google's AI answers reducing search traffic by 40% November 9, 2026 ![Line chart, September 2024 to August 2026. Google results showing an AI Overview rise from 5.9% to 61.4%, while results showing a featured snippet fall from 9.0% to 0.4%.](https://revscope.co/_astro/search-features-2024-2026.BZl2SRMo_Z24aVWv.webp) Google's AI answers are taking clicks from websites in the search results. A randomized experiment now puts a number on it: when researchers hid AI Overviews from US desktop users, the searches that would have shown one drew far more clicks, implying the Overviews cut clicks through to outside websites by about 40%. Those Overviews now appear on more than half the US keywords DataForSEO tracks, up from 6% two years ago. The industry's answer, GEO (generative engine optimization), has yet to show a way to compensate for the loss. While AI citations correlate with the same kind of link profile that goes with higher Google rankings, in March AI assistants sent websites just 0.3% of their traffic. Search engine optimization (SEO) still decides whether you can be found, but where an AI answer appears, a ranking brings 40% fewer visits than it used to. Generative engine optimization (GEO), the practice of getting your content cited in AI-written answers, looks mostly like SEO plus two additions: being present on the third-party sites AI answers draw from, and writing pages that are easy to quote. The evidence for anything more exotic is thin. ## Google answers first An AI Overview is a generated summary that Google places above the ordinary results, with links to the pages it drew on. In DataForSEO's monthly panel of 20 million keywords, the share of results showing one climbed from 5.93% in September 2024 to 61.43% in August 2026. The chart at the top of this post shows that climb. Over the same period the featured snippet, the quoted passage Google used to show at the top of a page, fell from 8.96% to 0.44%, and the discussions and forums block fell from 21.13% to 7.42%. Video results rose from 9.67% to 19.98%, though that is down from a peak of 31.05% in October 2025, and local map listings rose from 19.98% to 25.99%. DataForSEO's dataset covers 190 million keywords, 165 million AI answers, and 1.1 billion backlinks, mostly for US English searches. Pew Research Center offers an outside check their numbers. It logged the searches of 900 US adults in March 2025, re-ran them in April, and found summaries on 18% of them. DataForSEO's shows 14.67% for March and 17.63% for April which puts the two sources in close agreement. The usual ways of picking safer keywords don't reliably avoid them. Between the fourth quarter of 2025 and the third quarter of 2026, the rate rose for every type of search intent: | Search intent | Q4 2025 | Q3 2026 | | ------------------------------------ | ------- | ------- | | Informational (looking something up) | 48.42% | 70.44% | | Commercial (comparing options) | 26.30% | 51.35% | | Navigational (looking for a site) | 17.04% | 34.03% | | Transactional (ready to buy) | 10.82% | 28.64% | Smaller keywords aren't a refuge either. In that same quarter, keywords with 201 to 300 monthly searches showed Overviews 58.59% of the time, against 48.62% for those above 600. A separate dataset, from June to September 2026, covers difficulty and price. The easiest keywords showed Overviews 60.64% of the time and the hardest 53.76%. Keywords costing advertisers more than $5 a click were at 49.55% and those under 25 cents at 50.54%, with a low of 42.63% between $0.51 and $1.00. More than half the result pages have no price data and show Overviews 60.06% of the time. It varies by intent and industry. Health sits at 69.68% and finance at 68.80%, while apparel is at 37.48%, dining at 29.37%, and real estate at 22.27%. Search queries are also becoming longer, especially on desktop. Queries of five or more words grew from 29.3% to 34.8% of the unique queries seen on desktop over a year, and from 29.6% to 31.9% on mobile, but three-four word searches remain the most common. ## What happens to the clicks The strongest evidence is an experiment. Saharsh Agarwal and Ananya Sen gave US desktop Chrome users an extension that randomly left Google alone for one group and hid AI Overviews for another, then watched two weeks of real searches in January and February 2026. On searches that would show an Overview, the group that could see them averaged 0.37 clicks to outside websites per search, against 0.62 for the group that couldn't, which the authors report as a 39.8% reduction. Searches ending with no outbound click went from 54% to 73%. Clicks on ads didn't change, so Google is taking care to not cannibalize their own revenue. Across all searches, with and without an Overview, the authors put the loss at roughly 18.5% of the organic clicks a site gets from Google. The author's note this loss would grow as Google continues to increase AI Overviews. This randomized controlled trial (RCT) is widely considered the gold standard for experimental research and let's the experimenters distinguish cause and effect rather than correlation or coincidence. The effect was measured with informational searches. The results for navigational and transactional searches weren't statistically significant, though those groups were small. This is a working paper, not yet peer reviewed, and it covers desktop only. A separate preregistered experiment by Wang and colleagues, with 1,100 people, also found that removing AI Overviews and AI Mode raised clicks to publishers. Observational data points the same way. Pew found people clicked an ordinary result on 8% of visits to a results page with a summary and on 15% without one, and ended their browsing session on 26% against 16%. Pew's comparison isn't a controlled experiment, because the searches that draw a summary tend to be longer and phrased as questions. Click-through rate (CTR) is the share of people shown a result who click it. Across more than 2,000 websites in DataForSEO's panel, the desktop CTR of the first organic result fell from 17.83% in September 2025 to 7.43% in August 2026, a drop of 58%. Mobile fell from 25.17% to 20.80%, a drop of 17%. ![Line chart of position 1 click-through rate by month, September 2025 to August 2026. Desktop falls from 17.8% to about 15% by February, drops to about 8% in March 2026, and ends at 7.4%. Mobile falls from 25.2% to 13% by February, then recovers to 22.5% in May and ends at 20.8%.](https://revscope.co/_astro/position-1-ctr.CBmYYIdO_ZkB0ks.webp) Desktop lost nearly half its click-through rate in one month, March 2026, and stayed down. Mobile fell about as far over five months, then recovered most of it. These figures come from Table A2 of the report. Desktop plunged from 15.18% to 7.94% between February and March 2026. AI Overviews can't easily explain that step since the report has them almost flat that month, at 42.79% and then 43.38%. The change might be partially explained by changes in format and quality of the AI Overviews, but that is speculation on our part. Mobile, meanwhile, sank to 12.96% and then rebounded to 22.49% by May. The report itself says its data "does not establish" whether AI answers, layout changes, or changes in behavior are the cause. Its sample may also be shifting underneath it, since the unique desktop queries it counts fell by a third over the year, from 1.97 million to 1.32 million. Whatever the cause, it's apparent top rankings can earn much less than they used to. DataForSEO also estimates where clicks go on pages with and without an Overview. By its model, the first organic result holds 9 to 16 points less click share on pages with one, though these are different searches on a single day's snapshot: | Search intent | Position 1, no Overview | Position 1, with Overview | Overview's cited links | | ------------- | ----------------------- | ------------------------- | ---------------------- | | Informational | 37.1% | 20.7% | 42.4% | | Navigational | 33.4% | 24.1% | 44.8% | | Transactional | 37.6% | 21.4% | 43.0% | | Commercial | 33.8% | 21.1% | 42.2% | While the click-through rate on the AI Overview's cited links look promising, beware it's an estimate. The data from Pew saw clicks on links inside a summary on just 1% of visits, against 8% for ordinary results. That is about 1/4 of these numbers. Eighteen months and a large change in the product separate the two measurements, so it is difficult to say which is closer to the truth. Google disputes that search traffic to websites is declining. In August 2025 its head of Search, Liz Reid, wrote that total organic clicks were "relatively stable year-over-year" and that Google was sending "slightly more quality clicks", meaning clicks where people don't quickly come back. But she gave no figures to check that against. Your site can't see whether someone goes back to Google, so you can't check Google's quality-clicks claim yourself, but you can check what your Google clicks are worth. [RevScope](https://revscope.co/index.md), our product, shows revenue per visitor from Google, including AI Overviews and which landing pages earn more. ## Who the answers cite If the summary is what people read, the next question is who it quotes. The report compares Google's AI Overviews with ChatGPT, and their most-cited lists overlap but lead with different kinds of site. | Rank | Google AI Overviews | Citations | ChatGPT | Answers citing it | | ---- | ------------------- | --------- | -------------- | ----------------- | | 1 | youtube.com | 51.9M | wikipedia.org | 4.88M | | 2 | reddit.com | 25.1M | reddit.com | 3.25M | | 3 | facebook.com | 20.4M | fandom.com | 670K | | 4 | wikipedia.org | 19.9M | britannica.com | 486K | | 5 | google.com | 15.9M | nih.gov | 476K | Read the ranks across, not the counts, because the report warns the two platforms' totals aren't comparable. Reddit and Wikipedia rank near the top of both, and by our count 16 of the 30 domains in each top 30 appear on both lists. The differences are still large. YouTube is first in AI Overviews and nineteenth in ChatGPT. Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok make Google's top ten and miss ChatGPT's top 30, while Reuters, The Guardian, AP News, and The Washington Post make ChatGPT's top 30 and miss Google's. ChatGPT also often cites nobody: 27.3% of its answers had no source, against 0.7% for AI Overviews. So, as the report puts it, strength on one platform "doesn't automatically guarantee" the same on another. Reddit also appears in Google's ordinary top ten for 32.15% of the report's tracked results, nearly eight times Quora's 4.11%. Two limits apply to all of this. The answers come from prompts DataForSEO collected, and the report doesn't explain how they were chosen or whether they match what people really ask. And big platforms were never absent from search: Pew found Wikipedia, YouTube, and Reddit made up 15% of the sources in AI summaries and 17% of those in standard results. The prevailing wisdom that AI loves Reddit is clearly still true, however. ## GEO looks mostly like SEO, at two levels Google's position is that there are "no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary", beyond a page being indexed and eligible to show with a snippet. That is a vendor describing its own product, so it helps to look at the outside data. There are two parts to this, which sites get considered, and which page on a site gets picked. ### Which sites: link profiles correlate with citations A referring domain is another website that links to yours. DataForSEO measured how closely referring domains track AI citations using Spearman's correlation, a score where 0 means no relationship between two rankings and 1 means they match exactly. The score was 0.406 for AI Overviews and 0.377 for ChatGPT. Links marked as coming from user-generated content, such as forum posts, scored lower, at 0.342 and 0.314. These are moderate relationships, and they don't show that links cause citations, since large, well-known sites tend to have more of everything. The samples also contain only domains cited at least once, so they can't tell you what it takes to get cited for the first time. A similar pattern shows up in ordinary rankings: domains ranking first had a median of 111 referring domains against 85 for positions 4 to 10, with heavy overlap between the groups. For AI Overviews, the median cited domain had 282 referring domains on the easiest keywords and 1,571 on the hardest, after the report excluded giant platforms like YouTube and Amazon and any domain with fewer than 50 referring domains. Small sites weren't measured at all. The ranges are also wide, at 518 to 5,765 for the middle half of domains on the hardest keywords, so sites with very different link profiles get cited. ### Which page: cited pages often don't rank for the query Ranking for a query and being cited for it are drifting apart. Ahrefs found 76% of pages cited in AI Overviews ranked in the top 10 for that query in [July 2025](https://ahrefs.com/blog/search-rankings-ai-citations), and about 38% in [March 2026](https://ahrefs.com/blog/ai-overview-citations-top-10). The two studies differ in sample, parsing, and the Gemini model behind the Overviews, so the size of that fall isn't a clean measurement. One possible mechanism is what Google calls query fan-out: its documentation says these features may issue "multiple related searches across subtopics and data sources". A page could then be cited because it ranks for a related question the reader never typed. Ahrefs offers this only as a possibility, and its earlier study tested the idea and found that the data didn't support it. The most careful test of page-level tactics we found is a study by the SEO software company SISTRIX, published in October 2026. It paired 48,527 pages cited by ChatGPT, AI Mode, or AI Overviews with uncited pages from the same site, which removes the site's overall strength from the comparison. The figures below say how many times as often a page with the feature was cited. | Page feature | Factor | What SISTRIX says about it | | --------------------------------- | ------ | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | Current year in the title | 2.7 | A rough stand-in for maintained content, not a title trick; an initial indication | | Table of contents with jump links | 1.7 | Only 14% of pages had one; 2.5 on editorial sites | | FAQ structured data | 1.5 | At 833 URLs it pointed the opposite way, a warning about small GEO studies | | Visible last-updated date | 1.3 | 1.9 on editorial sites, but 0.7 on shops; only 5% of pages showed one | | Ten or more external links | 1.3 | Linking out to sources | | Product structured data | 0.8 | 0.5 in AI Overviews, but "not a lever, but no cause for concern either"; it should stay | | Many features combined | 2.1 | Against barely optimized pages | The paper that named GEO supports that direction with an actual experiment. Aggarwal and colleagues rewrote web pages and measured how much of a generated answer drew on them. On their 10,000-query benchmark, adding quotations raised a page's visibility by about 41%, adding statistics by about 31%, and citing sources by about 27%, while keyword stuffing lowered it by about 8%, all on their main measure, the position-weighted share of the answer's words. Lower-ranked pages gained the most: citing sources lifted a page ranked fifth by 115% and cut the top-ranked page by 30%. They also tried Perplexity, an AI search product, on 200 samples, uploading the source text as files rather than letting it search. The gains on that measure were smaller, at about 21% for quotations and 9% for statistics. The main test used GPT-3.5 reading the top five search results, which is well behind today's products, so the percentages are dated even if the direction still holds. The most debated shortcut has nothing behind it so far. llms.txt is a proposed file that tells AI systems what a site contains. SE Ranking analyzed nearly 300,000 domains and found no correlation with citations. SISTRIX also concluded there is "no measurable effect", though it cautions that domains with the file differ from others in many ways, so this part of its data doesn't have the same-site pairing. Google, says "you don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup" for its AI features - but this data would suggest otherwise. ## The direct traffic from AI is small but growing, and it may convert well AI assistants sent 0.28% of total traffic across 74,752 websites in March 2026, according to Ahrefs. That was about 3.5 million visitors, against 345 million from Google, or roughly a hundred to one. Ahrefs describes it as small but growing fast. The true figure is somewhat higher because some visits, especially from mobile apps, get counted as direct traffic. The same Ahrefs article reports that on its own site, AI search visitors were 0.5% of visitors and 12.1% of signups. That's one SEO software company whose audience may be unusually likely to use AI tools, but it shows those visits are valuable. There's also a harder-to-measure argument: people read AI answers and form opinions without clicking at all. To count what AI visits are worth on your own site, [RevScope](https://revscope.co/index.md) reports when ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and other assistants send visitors and whether they buy. It also tracks when AI and search engine bots crawl your pages. Google's own reporting has a gap too. It counts traffic from its AI features inside the overall "Web" numbers in Search Console. Since 2026 Search Console also has generative AI reports, which Google says show how often your URLs appeared in those features, along with pages, countries, and devices. The announcement describes impressions and doesn't mention clicks, so it tells you where you appear more readily than what that appearance is worth. Rank tracking can't fill the gap, since a page can hold position 1 and earn fewer clicks than it used to. ## What to do about it 1. **Keep the fundamentals.** Pages must be indexable and eligible for a snippet. Referring domains correlated with citations more strongly than user-generated links did, and higher-ranking domains had moderately more of them, so links from other sites remain a reasonable investment, even though neither relationship proves cause. 2. **Find out who gets cited on your topics, per platform.** Check your important queries in AI Overviews and ChatGPT and note the sources. Being described accurately there may matter as much as your own page. Take part in communities like Reddit so you get those citations that AI values. 3. **Write pages worth quoting.** Answer related questions directly, add original data and named sources, and use clear headings. If you run an editorial site, show when the page was last updated. 4. **Skip the shortcuts.** While it doesn't hurt to add an llms.txt, adding AI-specific markup, and keyword stuffing may hurt your visibility. 5. **Judge the work by revenue.** With fewer clicks to go around, it matters more which ones pay. Tie each channel to the sales it produces rather than to its rank or its visit count. RevScope, which publishes this blog, does this, and [reports](https://revscope.co/index.md) when AI assistants send visitors and whether they buy. Most of the numbers above have limits worth keeping in mind when you act on them. They are mainly US English, and the products change quickly, so the 2025 figures may already be out of date. Nearly all the large datasets come from companies that sell SEO data or software, including DataForSEO, Ahrefs, SISTRIX, and SE Ranking, and we sell analytics. Almost everything about what earns a citation is correlation. What holds up is narrower than either the "SEO is dead" or the "GEO changes everything" camp would like: controlled experiments show fewer clicks to outside websites when Google's AI features are present, domains with more referring domains tend to be cited more often among those already cited, and we found no proven shortcut to being cited. ## Sources [Search Insider: 2026 Edition](https://dataforseo.com/whitepapers/search-insider-2026)\ *DataForSEO · Annual research report · October 2026*\ DataForSEO collects search and AI answer data for a living and publishes its tables and methods, which allowed us to check the monthly figures behind its headlines. It sells this data, its answer prompts aren't explained, and its click shares are modeled. We rely on it for what appears where, and treat its click estimates and correlations as indications. Our charts are redrawn from its published values. [The Impact of Google AI Overviews on Publisher Traffic and User Experience: Evidence from a Field Experiment](https://ssrn.com/abstract=6513059)\ *Saharsh Agarwal and Ananya Sen · Working paper · SSRN · draft of June 2026*\ University researchers ran a preregistered randomized experiment on 1,065 US participants, 770 of them in the two groups compared here. Random assignment makes it the best evidence that Overviews themselves reduce clicks. It isn't yet peer reviewed, and it covers desktop Chrome for two weeks. We read a copy of the June draft hosted outside SSRN. [AI in Search Reduces Publisher Referrals Without Improving User Experience: Experimental Evidence](https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18352)\ *Stephanie T. Wang, Jeffrey Gleason, and colleagues · Preprint · arXiv · August 2026*\ A second preregistered experiment, with 1,100 people, which independently supports the direction of the result. We read its abstract only, so we use it for that direction and not for any figure. [Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/07/22/google-users-are-less-likely-to-click-on-links-when-an-ai-summary-appears-in-the-results/)\ *Athena Chapekis and Anna Lieb · Short read · Pew Research Center · July 2025*\ A nonprofit research organization with no search product to sell, logging the real browsing of 900 consenting US adults. It covers one month, March 2025, re-collected the summaries in April, and doesn't control for which searches draw a summary. [AI Features and Your Website](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ai-features) and [the Search Console reports announcement](https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2026/06/gen-ai-performance-reports)\ *Google Search Central · Documentation, last updated December 2025, and blog post, June 2026*\ The primary sources for what Google says its AI features require and how it reports them. They are reliable on those rules, and they aren't independent evidence of what works. [AI in Search is driving more queries and higher quality clicks](https://blog.google/products/search/ai-search-driving-more-queries-higher-quality-clicks/)\ *Liz Reid · Company blog · Google · August 2025*\ Google's public position on total clicks, from the person running Search. Google can see the true numbers, but this post publishes none of them, so we report it as a claim. [Citation Worthiness: Which GEO Tactics Hold Up Across 96,418 URLs](https://www.sistrix.com/blog/citation-worthiness-study/)\ *Johannes Beus, Julia Weissbach, and the SISTRIX Content Team · Industry study · SISTRIX · October 2026*\ Its same-site pairing and correction for multiple testing make it more careful than most GEO studies. It sells SEO software, covers only German-speaking markets, and reports correlations. [GEO: Generative Engine Optimization](https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.09735)\ *Pranjal Aggarwal, Vishvak Murahari, and colleagues · Conference paper · KDD 2024 · version 3, June 2024*\ The academic paper that named the field and ran controlled rewrites of pages. It shows content changes can move visibility, but its test engine is now dated, and its authors' "up to 40%" should not be read as a current forecast. [Update: 38% of AI Overview Citations Pull From The Top 10](https://ahrefs.com/blog/ai-overview-citations-top-10) and [76% of AI Overview Citations Pull From the Top 10](https://ahrefs.com/blog/search-rankings-ai-citations)\ *Louise Linehan with Xibeijia Guan · Industry studies · Ahrefs · March 2026 and July 2025*\ Ahrefs sells SEO tools and tracks AI answers through its Brand Radar product, here matching about 4 million cited URLs against rankings in the later study. The two studies aren't like-for-like. The 38% counts results in every part of the page; for ordinary links alone it is 37.1%. [AI Chatbot Traffic: What It Is, and How to Get More](https://ahrefs.com/blog/ai-chatbot-traffic/)\ *Mateusz Makosiewicz · Company blog · Ahrefs · May 2026*\ The source for the 0.28% figure, from analytics on 74,752 sites, and for the signup figure from Ahrefs' own site. It gives conflicting percentages for Google's share in different places, so we compare visitor counts instead. [LLMs.txt: Why Brands Rely On It and Why It Doesn't Work](https://seranking.com/blog/llms-txt/)\ *Yulia Deda · Industry study · SE Ranking · page dated October 2026*\ A large correlation study of nearly 300,000 domains. It doesn't name the AI platforms it sampled, so we use it only alongside SISTRIX and Google's statement. ## Stop guessing what makes money RevScope connects your web traffic to your payments, so you can see which channels, pages, and keywords bring in revenue. Start on the free plan and put your time and budget where it pays. [Start with free plan ](https://revscope.co/signup?tier=free)[See pricing](https://revscope.co/pricing.md) Rather run it yourself? RevScope is open source. [Self-host it for free](https://revscope.co/docs/self-hosting.md).