Sistrix looked at more than 100 million German keywords and found that when Google shows an AI Overview, the click-through rate at position one falls from 27% to 11% (Sistrix, 2026). That is a loss of almost 60% of the clicks the top result used to earn, on the same query, at the same rank.
When an AI Overview appears, the top organic result loses roughly 60% of its clicks: 27% down to 11% in Sistrix’s German data. Ahrefs measured the same collapse and then revised it worse, from a 34.5% drop to 58%. The clicks that survive skew toward higher intent. Fewer visitors, better ones.
Where does the 27-to-11 number come from?
The Sistrix analysis covered a national keyword set, not a hand-picked sample. AI Overviews appeared on about 20% of keywords, and across that slice the position-one click rate more than halved. Averaged over every keyword in the market, including the 80% with no AI Overview, the drop works out to a 6.6% loss across all German organic search, or about 265 million clicks a month (Search Engine Journal, 2026).
The damage is not spread evenly. Informational categories take the hardest hit: health questions, parenting, home improvement, the queries an AI can answer in three sentences without you clicking anything. Transactional queries barely move. If your money pages ask the reader to buy, book, or compare, the sky is lower than the headline suggests.
Did Ahrefs find the same thing?
Ahrefs ran its own study on a different market and got the same shape. The first pass, in early 2025 across 300,000 keywords, put the position-one click loss at 34.5% (Ahrefs, 2025). The update eight months later revised that to 58%: for AI Overview keywords, the average position-one CTR fell from 0.073 to 0.016 (Ahrefs, 2025).
Two independent teams, two markets, two methods, one direction. Google now keeps 58 of every 100 clicks a top-ranking page used to send you. It does not itemize them on an invoice.
If the clicks are gone, why isn’t the business gone?
HubSpot is the case everyone points to: reports of an 80% blog-traffic drop, followed by HubSpot explaining that it had pruned more than 30,000 low-converting pages on purpose, that transactional search stayed strong, and that traffic from large language models was climbing (HubSpot, 2026). The volume that vanished was the volume that was never going to buy anything.
That is the reframe worth taking to a board: a click that never converts is a vanity metric wearing a suit. When the AI Overview absorbs the “what is” traffic and passes through the “which one should I pick” traffic, your visitor count drops and your close rate can hold or rise. The dashboard looks like collapse. The pipeline does not.
So what do you measure instead of rank?
Rank on the visible query stops predicting anything once an AI layer sits above it. What survives scrutiny is citation share: how often you appear in the generated answer at all, sampled over repeated runs, not read off one lucky result.
We see why single-run rank is a trap in our own scans. Running the same brand through the same five-question check on two different days returned two out of five mentions, then three out of five. Same site, same questions, different weather. But citation dominance is steadier than mention rate: a directory site we test against in the fertility niche came back cited in five of five answers on one question set and four of five on a second, independently generated set. Mention rates wobble run to run. The domains that own a category tend to keep owning it. That gap, between noisy presence and stable dominance, is the thing a real measure has to capture, and it is why we report share of voice as a range, never a rank.
The practical next step: pull your top informational URLs, check which now sit under an AI Overview, and stop grading them on clicks. Grade them on whether the AI answer cites you. You can run a free scan to see which of your pages an AI assistant mentions today, before you spend a quarter optimizing for clicks that already left.
Sources
- AI Overviews in Germany: how much click-through rates are really dropping (Sistrix)
- Google AI Overviews cut Germany’s top organic CTR by 59% (Search Engine Journal)
- AI Overviews reduce clicks by 34.5% (Ahrefs)
- Update: AI Overviews reduce clicks by 58% (Ahrefs)
- Did HubSpot really lose 80% of blog traffic? (HubSpot)