You open Search Console. Average position 1.8. Impressions are up on last year. Clicks are down. The first reaction is usually “something broke”, but most of the time nothing is broken. The user reads the answer in the AI summary Google puts at the very top and leaves. This is called zero-click search, and over the last two years it has become measurable.
What Do the Numbers Say?
We have two studies with open methodology. They measure different things, so they need to be read separately.
Ahrefs (4 February 2026). The analysis published by Ryan Law looks at 300,000 keywords: 150,000 where AI Overviews appear, and 150,000 informational searches where no overview appears. The data comes from aggregated Search Console records, comparing December 2023 with December 2025. For keywords with AI Overviews, the desktop click-through rate of position 1 fell from 7.3% to 1.6%. Informational searches without an overview also fell (from 7.6% to 3.9%), but much more gently. The conclusion from the difference: AI Overviews is associated with roughly a 58% lower click-through rate for the page in position 1. In the April 2025 version of the same study this figure was 34.5%. So the effect has grown within a year.
Pew Research Center (22 July 2025). Here it is people, not keywords, being tracked. The study examined 68,879 Google searches made by 900 US adults in March 2025. People who saw an AI summary clicked a classic result in 8% of visits; for those who did not see a summary, the figure was 15%. Clicks on a source link inside the summary were only 1%. One more detail: 26% of those who saw a summary ended their session entirely after that search, versus 16% for those who didn't.
Two caveats must not be skipped. Ahrefs says in its own article that this is correlation, not causation. Pew's data is from the US and from March 2025, when roughly one in five searches showed a summary. I could not find a study of this scale published for Turkey. So I won't write a sentence like “your site will drop 58% too”; you need to look at your own data, and looking isn't hard.
How Do You See This on Your Own Site?
A ten-minute check is enough:
- In Search Console, open the Performance → Search results report.
- In the date filter choose Compare and put the last 3 months side by side with the previous 3 months (or the same period last year).
- Turn on all four columns, clicks, impressions, CTR and position, and switch to the Pages tab.
- Look for this pattern: impressions the same or up, position unchanged, clicks and CTR down.
This pattern is not a ranking loss. In a ranking loss, impressions fall too. Here your page is still visible; there is simply an answer box above it. To see which queries it happens on, select the same page and switch to the Queries tab; searches that can be answered in a single sentence, such as “what is”, “how to” and “how much”, usually stand out.
Which Content Is Affected Most?
The logic is simple: a question whose answer fits in a paragraph ends inside the summary. “What is the VAT rate”, “what is llms.txt”, “is n8n free” are such questions. For searches where the user has to decide, compare, get a price or have something done, they still need to go to a page. The gap between Ahrefs' two groups says the same: for informational searches clicks decline in every case, and when a summary appears the decline doubles.
In my view, the real issue for a small business is this: the “what is” posts on your blog will no longer bring in as many visitors as before. But most of those visitors weren't buying anything anyway.
What Should You Do?
Be a source inside the summary. AI summaries take their answers from somewhere and cite sources. To make your page one of those sources, give the answer to the question in the first paragraph, clearly and with a number; write headings as question sentences; don't leave out schema markup (FAQPage, Article). We covered the technical side in our llms.txt article.
Produce content that can't be summarized. Your own price list, your own process steps, a result you measured yourself, a calculator. AI can summarize “what is WhatsApp automation”; it can't summarize “in how many months will it pay for itself in your business”, because the answer depends on your numbers.
Change what you measure. Clicks alone are now misleading. Add three things next to them: the number of searches for your brand name (visible in Search Console with a query filter), whether your name appears in AI answers (we explained how to track this in the AI visibility article), and the real number at the end: incoming forms, calls, WhatsApp messages.
Don't lean on a single channel. A site whose entire traffic comes from informational searches on Google is the site hit hardest by this shift. Channels you control, such as an email list, WhatsApp and LinkedIn, are insurance.
So Is SEO Over?
No, and I'm not saying that for comfort. The summary's sources are chosen from search results; a page that isn't ranking has a very low chance of appearing in the summary. What has changed is what you get in return for ranking. Position 1 used to mean clicks. Now it means visibility first and sometimes clicks. The goal has to be set accordingly: instead of “this many visitors a month”, “let our name appear for these questions, and this many enquiries a month”.
Sources: Ahrefs, "Update: AI Overviews Reduce Clicks by 58%" (4 February 2026) · Pew Research Center, "Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results" (22 July 2025)
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In half an hour we can work out which pages get impressions but lose clicks, and for which questions you could become a source for AI summaries.