AI Overviews
AI Overviews is Google's AI-generated summary that appears above the organic results for many searches, answering the query directly and citing a handful of sources instead of showing ten ranked links.
AI Overviews is the AI-generated box Google shows at the top of many search results pages, answering the query in a short written summary and linking out to a handful of sources. It sits above the ranked list of organic results, so a page can rank well and still lose the click if the AI Overview already answered the question.
Pew Research Center studied real browsing data from 900 US adults in 2025 and found that when an AI summary was present, users clicked an organic link on just 8% of visits, versus 15% of visits when no summary was shown. They clicked a link inside the summary itself only 1% of the time. Google publicly disputed this study, so treat it as one data point rather than settled fact.
Ahrefs, tracking 863,000 search results pages between July 2025 and March 2026, found that the share of AI Overview citations coming from pages that also rank in Google's top 10 organic results fell from 76% to 38% over that period. Ahrefs attributes the drop to Google's query fan-out, where the AI Overview pulls from a broader set of searches than the one the user typed, not just the top-ranked pages for that exact query.
Ahrefs also found that position-1 organic click-through rate on queries with an AI Overview present fell 34.5% by April 2025, then 58% by December 2025, compared with queries that had no AI Overview. Ranking first still matters, but it's worth less traffic on queries where Google decides to show an AI Overview.
Keep exploring the glossary
- Answer EngineAn answer engine is an AI system, such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google's AI Overviews, or Copilot, that responds to a question with a direct written answer naming a small number of options instead of a page of ranked links.
- GroundingGrounding is when an AI model bases its answer on live, retrieved information, such as a web search result, instead of relying only on what it learned during training, which is meant to make answers more current and accurate.
- Citation (AI answer)In an AI answer, a citation is a source the engine references or links to while generating its response, and the number of sources cited per answer varies widely by engine, from about 2.5 for Copilot up to about 7.7 for Google AI Overviews.
Common questions about AI Overviews
- Do AI Overviews replace the local 3-pack?
- No, and nobody has published a reliable measurement of how often AI Overviews appear on local queries versus the local map 3-pack. The two surfaces are driven by different signals, and figures claiming a specific appearance rate for AI Overviews on local searches are not backed by a real study.