Published: October 1, 2026 · Last updated: October 1, 2026
TL;DR: New Q2 2026 data from Advanced Web Ranking shows desktop click-through rates on Google falling while mobile rates climbed, and the gap between searches with and without AI Overviews widened to over 19 percentage points.
Desktop and mobile search are moving in opposite directions, and the split got sharper last quarter. Advanced Web Ranking’s Q2 2026 click-through rate report, covering April through June and measured against Q1, found desktop CTR for the top two combined positions fell 5.27 percentage points while the same positions on mobile grew 6.59 points.
Narrow the data further and the pattern holds. For single-word queries landing in position one, desktop CTR dropped 4.15 points while mobile rose 7.42 points. Even branded queries, searches where someone already knows exactly which site they want, showed every desktop position in the top 20 falling between 1.47 and 3.08 points, while mobile’s top position actually gained 1.40 points.
The clearest explanation sits in the AI Overviews data. On U.S. desktop searches without an AI Overview present, the combined click-through rate for positions one and two was 29.05 percent. Add an AI Overview to the results page, and that combined rate drops to 10.04 percent. That’s a 19.01 percentage point gap, and it’s 6.03 points wider than it was back in Q1. AI Overviews are answering the question directly on the results page often enough that fewer people feel the need to click through to a website at all, and that effect is intensifying quarter over quarter rather than leveling off.
There’s an important asterisk on all of this. Google’s Search Console had a logging error that ran from May 2025 through late April 2026, which distorted impression reporting for the better part of a year. Most of the Q2 data in this report came after that fix was in place, while Q1’s numbers fell entirely within the error window. That makes a clean quarter-over-quarter comparison harder to trust at face value, since part of what looks like a widening gap could be an artifact of comparing a fixed measurement period against a broken one.
Even accounting for that caveat, the underlying desktop-versus-mobile divergence tracks with what plenty of site owners have been reporting anecdotally all year: mobile traffic holding up or even improving in spots, desktop referrals from organic search quietly eroding, especially on anything that resembles a direct factual question an AI Overview can answer in two sentences. For publishers and small business sites that built their traffic strategy around ranking for exactly those kinds of queries, that’s the number that should actually keep someone up at night, not the overall CTR average.
Related: Google’s AI Mode Will Now Watch the Web for You, Whether You Pay for It or Not and Google Ads API v25.2 Hands Agencies the Competitive Data They Used to Guess At.
Bottom Line: The data error muddies the exact size of the shift, but not its direction. Desktop clicks next to an AI Overview are disappearing faster than mobile clicks are, and any site still treating desktop and mobile traffic as one combined number is going to misread what’s actually happening to its organic search performance.
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