Six months into broad AI Overview rollout, the pattern in our client accounts is consistent enough to stop calling it an anomaly. Organic impressions are holding steady or climbing. Organic clicks, for a specific slice of query types, are not following.
This isn’t the “SEO is dead” narrative that shows up every few years. It’s narrower and more useful than that: click-through rate is compressing on informational, single-fact queries, while it’s holding — or in some cases improving — on comparison, evaluation and bottom-funnel terms.
What the data actually shows
Across the accounts we manage, we segmented non-branded queries into three buckets: single-fact informational (“what is X”), comparative or evaluative (“X vs Y”, “best X for Y”), and transactional or navigational. The CTR compression is concentrated almost entirely in the first bucket.
For comparative queries — the ones that actually drive B2B and SaaS pipeline — CTR held closer to historical baselines. Our working theory: AI Overviews satisfy a quick factual lookup well enough that users don’t click through, but they don’t fully satisfy someone trying to make a considered decision between vendors.
The keywords that used to be “easy wins” for top-of-funnel content are the ones losing the most click-through. The keywords that drive revenue are, so far, largely intact.
What we’re changing in content strategy
1. De-prioritizing pure definition content
Content built purely to answer a single factual question is getting deprioritized in favor of content that requires synthesis: comparisons, frameworks, and opinionated takes an AI Overview can summarize but not fully replace.
2. Restructuring existing pages for extractability
We’re structuring key sections — clear definitions, direct answers, well-labeled data points — so they’re easier for AI systems to extract and attribute back to the source.
3. Shifting measurement toward assisted visibility
We’re tracking AI Overview appearance rate and citation frequency alongside traditional rankings, treating visibility inside the answer as a distinct KPI.
The practical takeaway
If your organic strategy is still weighted heavily toward top-of-funnel, single-fact content, expect click-through rate to keep softening on that segment. The response isn’t to abandon informational content; it’s to rebalance investment toward the comparative content that still earns a click, and to treat AI Overview visibility as a KPI you actively manage.
alaa96eldin.mohamed@gmail.com
We publish what we're seeing across active client accounts — SEO, technical audits and growth data, written the week we observe it rather than batched into quarterly recaps.