Written by Admin Alex · Fact-Checked by M.Ali · Info Verified September 2026
We review and update this article regularly as new information becomes available.
TL;DR: A new Seer Interactive study of 5.47 million queries found organic click-through rates rebounded from 1.3% in December 2025 to 2.4% in February 2026, an 85% jump in two months. Pages that get cited inside an AI Overview still get roughly double the clicks of pages that don’t, and AI Overviews barely show up on transactional searches at all, which matters more for SEO strategy than the topline recovery number does.
The story SEOs have been telling each other for the past year is simple: AI Overviews eat clicks, full stop. New data from Seer Interactive complicates that story without erasing it. The agency analyzed 53 brands, 5.47 million queries, and 2.43 billion impressions between January 2025 and February 2026, and found organic CTR bottomed out at 1.3% in December 2025 before climbing to 2.4% by February, an 85% recovery in just two months.
That’s not a full recovery to pre-AI Overview click rates, but it’s a meaningfully different trend line than the “clicks are gone forever” narrative that dominated last year’s SEO conversation.
The part that actually matters for strategy
The topline recovery number is the headline, but the breakdown underneath it is more useful. Searches with no AI Overview present still convert to clicks at about 3.3%. Pages that get cited inside an AI Overview pull around 2.1%, roughly double the 0.9% rate for pages that show up in the Overview’s sources without an actual citation link. Getting cited, not just getting mentioned or scraped into the summary, is the difference that shows up in the data.
Query type matters just as much as citation status. AI Overviews show up on 95% of comparison queries and 86% of question queries, the “which is better” and “how does X work” searches where a synthesized answer genuinely helps. They show up on only 5% of transactional queries, the “buy,” “price,” and “near me” searches that most businesses actually care about ranking for. If your traffic depends on commercial intent searches rather than informational ones, AI Overviews may be affecting you far less than the industry-wide panic suggested.
Where the real traffic shift is happening
Organic CTR on searches without an AI Overview present climbed from 2.8% in early 2025 to 3.8% by February 2026, a bigger jump proportionally than the AI Overview recovery itself. Seer’s read is that user behavior is sorting itself: simple factual questions increasingly get answered inside the search results page itself, while searches that need deeper research still send people to actual websites, and those clicks are becoming more valuable as a result. Paid search, for what it’s worth, barely moved: CTR on ads rose modestly, from 14.6% to 16.2%, when an AI Overview appeared alongside them.
Seer’s methodology is worth a quick note for anyone citing this data elsewhere: the 53 brands in the sample skew toward mid-size to enterprise businesses running dedicated SEO programs, not small local businesses, so the recovery pattern may look different for a single-location service business than it does for a national retailer with thousands of indexed pages. That caveat doesn’t undercut the core finding, but it’s a reason to treat the specific percentages as directional rather than universal before rebuilding an entire content strategy around them.
Bottom Line: AI Overviews didn’t kill organic search traffic the way the worst-case predictions suggested, but they did permanently reshape which searches still send clicks. Getting cited beats getting mentioned, informational content took the biggest hit, and transactional searches are mostly untouched. Anyone still optimizing purely for ranking position without checking whether Google is actually citing the page is optimizing for the wrong metric now.
