Top of Google, yet fewer clicks
approx 8 minute read
AI Overviews appear on 36% of informational searches and almost none of the transactional ones. Whether your SEO still works depends on which of those your customers are typing.
“I want to be top of Google.”
“That’ll cost ya.”
“How much?”
“Ooh. About 58% of your clicks.”
AI overviews are eating attention
Ahrefs re-ran their clickthrough study in February 2026, analysing 300,000 keywords, half with AI Overviews and half without.
When an AI Overview appears at the top of the results, the page ranking first receives 58% fewer clicks than it otherwise would.
When they ran the same analysis previously, the figure was 34.5%.
Just ten months on, that’s nearly double.
And the trend runs down the entire first page.
So the click you spent three years fighting for is worth less than it was, depending on what you measure.
But the work behind it isn’t lost. Here’s why.
Before anyone books a crisis meeting
Rand Fishkin of SparkToro has been measuring this longer than almost anyone, and he’s sceptical that AI has changed all that much about how people actually behave.
The number of Google searches per person hasn’t fallen. People are still on Reddit, still on Facebook, still asking in the WhatsApp group who does a decent job on block paving.
His point is that zero-click has been creeping up for a decade and the real casualty is attribution, not demand.
The customers are still out there. What’s changed is your ability to watch them arrive.
His advice is to stop obsessing over direct traffic and start associating your brand with the problem you solve.
The difference that matters: AI versus Google, or AI inside Google
We’ve argued before on this journal that the threat from AI chatbots has been overstated.
As a share of the traffic and revenue arriving at a small business website, ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and the rest are a rounding error next to Google.
Fishkin’s figure for their combined contribution is a fraction of one percent.
If that was the whole story, you could ignore all of it and carry on.
But it isn’t the whole story, because the AI that matters isn’t in a chat window… It’s sitting at the top of the Google results page your customers already use.
Everybody needs to pay attention when Google puts a generated answer above the results on a third of informational searches, because that’s not a new channel.
That’s your existing channel, rearranged.
Which is why the citation is the thing to chase.
Not because AI is the future of search, but because AI is now a layer on top of the search you already depend on, and being named inside that layer is the difference between 20,700 clicks per million impressions and 9,400.
Google still delivers. It’s just changed how it hands things over.
The six steps below are here to help you adapt your playbook.
1. Sort your queries into two piles
The damage is uneven, and that’s the useful part.
Open Search Console. Performance, last 16 months, tick both Clicks and Impressions.
If impressions are flat or rising while clicks fall, that’s what being summarised looks like.
If both are falling, you have an ordinary ranking problem and this is the wrong article.
Then export your top 50 queries and mark each one L, T or I. Local, transactional, or informational.
A worktop fitter in Harlow will find “quartz worktops Harlow” still earning its clicks, because that person wants a price and a date.
“How do you clean quartz worktops” will be answered in full on the results page.
Both pages have a job. Only one of them was ever going to get the phone to ring.
And local search isn’t out of the woods entirely.
Seer Interactive found that informational “near me” searches trigger an AI Overview 76.9% of the time.
Map results are holding up though. “Best plumber near me” is not the same thing as “plumber sutton coldfield”, and Google treats them differently.
2. Rewrite your answers so they can be quoted
To get named in an answer, you have to be quotable. Most small business web copy is not.
Here’s the sort of thing that gets skipped:
“There are many factors that influence the cost of a new website, and every business is different, so it’s difficult to give a firm figure without understanding your full requirements.”
And here’s the sort of thing that gets lifted:
“A five-page brochure site costs £500 to £2,000. Ecommerce with up to 50 products starts around £2,500. The four things that move the price are custom design, page count, how the product catalogue is supplied, and any integration with another system.”
Same information, roughly. The first one is written to avoid being wrong. The second one is written to be useful. Only one of them gets repeated back to a customer.
The short version of the rules: use the customer’s actual question as your heading, answer it in the first forty words underneath, be specific about prices and timescales, and if you can, put a named human and a date on the page.
We’ll go deeper on this next month, because it deserves its own piece.
3. Work the ground AI hasn’t taken
Working on your Google Business Profile is still a very high-return-vs-time activity that you can take control of.
Get your category and sub-categories right.
This is worth a little keyword research. You can use Google’s keyword tool in Google Ads to help you with this, or just search on your browser and use an LLM to go a little deeper.
On your profile, complete every field. All of them. The services list especially, because that’s the bit most people leave half done.
Post photos and updates weekly. Real photos of actual work, not stock images of a handshake.
And build review requests into the job rather than remembering to ask when you’re feeling brave.
At the invoice, at the sign-off, at the point the customer is happiest with you.
4. Own the channels nobody rents you
Every channel where an algorithm sits between you and your customer is a channel that can be adjusted without asking you first.
Your email list can’t be. Neither can the customers with your number in their phone.
A van with your name on it, a sign above the door, a well-designed mailer to your past customers: none of those get reranked in February.
Good business marketing is multi-channel.
5. Change what you measure
Nike left the S&P 100 this month, after eighteen years in it.
The stock is down about 78% from its 2021 peak, which is more than $200 billion of value.
Plenty went wrong. But the account that should interest anyone reading this came from Massimo Giunco, who spent 25 years there in senior marketing roles.
Massimo argued that Nike swapped brand building for performance marketing and then congratulated itself on the dashboards.
The performance ads looked brilliant.
They were measurable, attributable, and the return on ad spend was excellent.
What they were mostly doing was collecting demand that thirty years of brand work had already built.
Once the brand work stopped, the demand stopped arriving, and the dashboards kept reporting a healthy return on a shrinking pool.
The intangible stuff was the stuff that was working. It was also the stuff nobody could put in a spreadsheet, so it lost every budget argument it was in.
You are not Nike.
You are also not immune, and the mechanism is about to get considerably more tempting, because the numbers in your analytics are about to tell a story that isn’t true.
Sessions will fall. But are customers still showing up?
A perfectly sensible business owner will cut the marketing that’s working, because the stats look unconvincing. People want proof.
Here are five things also worth reporting.
Branded search impressions
Filter Search Console for your own business name. That’s demand for you specifically, not for a category you happen to rank in. Slowest to move, most meaningful when it does.
Self-reported attribution
A simple “how did you hear about us?” on the enquiry form, and asked out loud on the phone. If attribution modelling is finished, asking people directly is the honest replacement.
Google Business Profile performance
Calls, direction requests, messages, website clicks, and the split between discovery and direct searches. Free, and it tells you more than most paid tools.
Conversion rate per session
As the low-intent informational traffic drops away, this should climb. A site with 30% fewer visits and a higher conversion rate is healthier than it was, and this is the number that proves it to anyone who needs convincing.
AI assistant referrals
Check your analytics for traffic from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini. The volumes are small. The quality is not, because the assistant has already recommended you before they arrive.
And things to stop putting in the monthly report: sessions as a headline, bounce rate, and rankings with no click data next to them.
One warning that comes straight from the research. Seer found that when brands saw their cited clickthrough rate fall, clicks had actually stayed flat while impressions doubled. The rate dropped because the denominator grew. Look at clicks and impressions separately before you conclude anything. A falling percentage can mean you’re winning.
6. Run a citation check on the first of every month
You don’t necessarily need a fancy tool for this.
Write down ten questions a customer would genuinely ask.
Run each one in Google’s AI Mode, ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini.
Log whether you get named.
Ten minutes a month, and “are we visible in AI” stops being a worry and becomes a spreadsheet with a trend line on it.
Which is a much better thing to bring to a meeting.
So, back to our friend who wants to be top of Google
They can still have it. And they should still want it.
AI Overviews don’t appear on every search.
Seer Interactive’s 2026 study, covering 5.47 million queries across 53 brands, found they show on 36% of informational searches, 8% of commercial ones and just 5% of transactional ones.
The searches where somebody wants to buy something or book someone are largely still clean results pages.
Which means the answer to “is SEO still worth it” depends entirely on what your customers actually type.
If your money queries are “emergency plumber sutton coldfield” and “wedding photographer shropshire prices”, the ground under you has barely moved.
If your traffic came mostly from how-to articles and comparison pages, it has moved a great deal.
Comparison queries trigger an overview 95.4% of the time
The more interesting finding is what happened to the searches Google left alone.
Organic clickthrough on results pages with no overview went up over 2025 and into 2026, from 2.75% to 3.82%.
Seer’s explanation is a selection effect: the overviews have absorbed the people who only ever wanted a quick answer, leaving the ones who actually intend to click on something.
Fewer visits. Better visits.
And where an overview does appear, being cited inside it delivers 120% more clicks per impression than appearing on the same page without a citation.
It won’t get you back to what you had, because a citation still underperforms a clean results page by 38%.
Roughly 20,700 clicks per million impressions against 9,400.
Top of Google is still worth having.
Just know what you’re buying now.
It isn’t only the click. It’s being the business the answer is built from, which means a site a machine can read, a profile that’s actually finished, and enough specific, checkable detail on your pages that you’re the obvious thing to cite.
Nobody gets summarised into an answer when they weren’t in the debate to begin with.