What are Google's AI Overviews, and do they hurt my traffic?

Google's AI Overviews are the AI written summaries at the top of many searches, shown to everyone in the US since May 2024. They do cut clicks. Pew found people clicked a result on 8% of searches with a summary and 15% without one. Pages the summary cites lose far fewer clicks than pages it leaves out.

Google started showing them to everyone in the US on May 14, 2024. The three biggest studies so far agree on the direction.

Study	What it found
Pew Research Center, July 2025 (900 US adults, March 2025)	People clicked a result on 8% of searches with a summary and 15% without. Only 1% clicked a link inside the summary.
Ahrefs, February 2026 (300,000 keywords, December 2025)	The top result got 58% fewer clicks when an AI Overview showed.
Seer Interactive, 2026 (5.47 million searches, January 2025 to February 2026)	Pages cited in the summary got about 2.1% of clicks, pages left out about 0.9%, and results with no summary about 3.3%.

So the goal changes: you want to be the business the summary names, not only a link under it. Google says there's no special trick or extra markup for this. A page has to be indexed and able to show a snippet, and the usual good practices apply. AI Overviews and AI Mode run several related searches at once to build an answer, so a page that answers the exact question near the top has the best shot. Clicks from them show up in Search Console's Performance report, under Web. For local searches Google still shows the map and its businesses too, so your Business Profile matters as much as ever.

For example, someone searches "how much does it cost to pressure wash a driveway". If your site answers that in its first sentence, with a price range and your town, you're the kind of page Google likes to quote.

We write your pages so the first sentence answers the question, and we check the AI reports Google and Bing now give site owners to see where you show up. More on getting ChatGPT to recommend you and GEO.

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