VANCOUVER, Wash. – Digital marketing agency Gravitate recently released an analysis demonstrating that high organic search rankings are no longer sufficient to deliver website traffic.
Combining public data from Ahrefs, Pew Research Center, SparkToro, Gartner and Press Gazette/Chartbeat, the analysis shows that Google’s new AI Overviews are acting as an accelerant to a decade-long structural shift away from click-through traffic.
While Google was moving away from click-throughs before artificial intelligence, the movement is now occurring faster than at any previous point on record, the report shows.
The report takes on one of the most perplexing issues in the current digital marketing landscape: why businesses are paying for SEO, achieving good search results but watching website traffic continue to decline. The finding is that for an increasing number of search queries, the problem is not visibility. What is broken is the expectation that visibility translates into visitors.
Google receives more searches than at any time before but is responsible for driving an ever-shrinking percentage of that traffic outside of their platform and out into the open web. The data now shows that open web traffic is at its lowest point over the past 10 years.
A 2026 study from Spark Toro, conducted in collaboration with Similarweb, determined that in the United States, 68% of all Google searches conclude without a click, a jump of almost 7 percentage points in just two years (from about 60.45%), and up from an estimated 45% 10 years ago. For every 1,000 searches on Google, there are now fewer than 320 directions to the external web.
None of this is entirely new to the AI era. Google had already been steadily reducing clicks over time. A 2024 SparkToro study based on inputs from the Datos clickstream panel data showed that 58.5% of Google searches in the U.S. ended without a click. People were already ending their session on the Google results page, either because they had found an answer or they just continued searching elsewhere on the page. AI overviews did not create zero-click behavior – it accelerated it.
As AI Overviews continue to roll out across search, these early numbers paint a grim picture. According to Ahrefs’ 300,000-keyword study of averaged Google Search Console data published in February (based on December 2025 data), AI Overviews correlate with a 58% fewer click-through rate for the first ranking search result. This is nearly double the rate than Ahref’s early analyses in April 2025 when the drop was only 34.5%. This signals that the effect is worsening as Google incorporates AI results into more search queries.
Pew Research Center’s analysis shows similar results. With direct behavioral data, it observed 900 U.S adults navigating from 68,879 Google searches and tracked actual link clicks and website visits as part of its March 2025 research.
On search queries that surface a featured AI Overview, just 8% of resulting search sessions resulted in a user clicking on a traditional link, compared with 15% on searches that did not include an AI Overview (roughly a 47% drop in the chance of a click). Only 1% of all clicks were to a URL that was contained within the AI Overview.
The two studies measure different things, with Ahrefs analyzing what happens to click rates when AI Overviews appear at scale, while Pew Research Center captured what people actually do on the search page.
When a Google AI Overview is present and a traditional result sits in position one directly beneath it, that result’s click-through rate drops 58% below baseline, according to Ahrefs data from February 2025.
The broader picture from Pew Research (2025) is just as stark: Any traditional result appearing alongside an AI Overview earns a click-through rate of just 8%, compared with 15% when no AI Overview is present. As for the links embedded inside the AI Overview itself, they capture only 1% of clicks, meaning the feature that displaces organic traffic delivers almost none of it back.
The total publisher referral traffic shows the same trend. Referrals via Google search by publisher type dropped by roughly 33% globally in 2025, according to data from Press Gazette, Chartbeat and the Society of News Editors. These referrals dropped 38% in the U.S. Publishers like Business Insider lost 55% of their referral traffic via Google, and Forbes and HuffPost each lost about 50% of referral traffic.
Their losses are the result of Google’s attempt to satisfy more of the search queries, without users having to leave the Google ecosystem, and in doing so returning less traffic to the external publishers directly.
While AI Overviews might be the most obvious factor for a drop in traffic, many other factors might lead to a decline in organic traffic. Combining these factors could lead to an incorrect culprit. In March 2024, Google released the company’s core update that reduced what the company considered low-value content from the search results page by 45%. This was considered one of the biggest updates from Google in recent years. For many websites, some pages (or even a section of their entire site) had been de-indexed or effectively lost their ranking almost overnight.
While AI Overviews may suppress click-through rates but leave ranking intact, an algorithm update can completely remove a page’s ranking. Both are incredibly problematic, and they require very different actions to fix. This matters when it comes to the practical implications when trying to figure out why traffic is slipping.
As Gartner noted in February 2024, search engines are expected to shift 25% of all queries that used to be search engine-based to AI chatbots and other assistants by 2026. With generative AI, the answer for many previously searched-based questions are coming via chatbots rather than traditional searches.