AI Overviews Branded CTR: Why Brand Searches Gain Clicks

The headline number hides a split

Most discussion of Google's AI Overviews centers on one alarming trend: clicks are disappearing. The aggregate figures support that worry. One 2026 tally puts the share of Google searches ending without a click at 65.4%, up from 58.5% in 2024 3. AI Overviews now appear on somewhere between 42% and 58% of queries, depending on the tracker and vertical 34.

A closer look at the data shows that the damage is not spread evenly. On branded queries, where someone is searching for a specific company or product, several analyses find that click-through rates rise when an AI Overview appears. Estimates put the gain at roughly 18% 4, or 18.7% in a compilation of independent studies 2. Informational queries show the opposite pattern and are absorbing most of the losses.

Where the clicks are vanishing

The sharpest declines hit simple informational searches such as definitions, how-tos, and factual lookups. On informational head terms that trigger an AI Overview, CTR reportedly fell from 1.76% to 0.61%, a relative drop of 61% 4. Other summaries go further and describe informational losses of 70–80% 2. Informational queries also carry the highest zero-click rate of any category, at 79% 3.

Commercial and transactional searches are hurt less. One breakdown estimates commercial queries lose 35–45% of clicks and transactional queries 20–30% 2. A finance-sector study of 40,000 keywords found informational CTR fell by 33.33 percentage points while transactional CTR fell 9.5 points 1. Position-one organic CTR in that study dropped from 10.67% to 7% 1.

The exact numbers vary widely between studies. That reflects differences in sector, sample, and whether results are reported as relative or absolute changes. The direction is consistent, though: the more an AI summary can fully answer a question, the fewer people click through.

Why brands might benefit

The proposed explanation for the branded lift is straightforward. When an AI Overview gives a clear answer about a brand next to a recognizable source link, it seems to reinforce the user's intent rather than replace the visit 4. Someone searching for a company already wants that company, and the summary may simply confirm they are in the right place.

This matters because AI Overviews are spreading beyond informational queries. A Semrush analysis of 10 million keywords found that the informational share of AI Overview-triggering queries fell from 91.3% to 57.1% over roughly ten months 1. Over a similar period, AI Overview appearances on navigational queries grew from 0.74% to 10.33% 1. Brand-adjacent searches are therefore increasingly likely to show a summary, which makes the branded effect more relevant to marketers.

The citation caveat

None of this means that being mentioned in an AI Overview restores lost traffic. One dataset found that when a brand is cited inside an AI Overview, its organic CTR reaches about 2.1%. That compares with 3.3% for the same kind of result with no AI Overview at all, and 0.9% for uncited pages 5. A citation narrows the gap but does not close it.

Ahrefs data cited in the same reporting indicates AI Overviews still cut top-position CTR by 58% 5. Citations are also highly concentrated. Somewhere between 15 and 50 domains, including Reddit, Wikipedia, Forbes, and YouTube, reportedly capture around 68% of AI citations across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and AI Overviews 5. For many brands, visibility in AI answers may come mainly through those platforms rather than their own websites.

The pressure extends to paid search as well. Paid CTR is estimated to fall about 68% on queries with AI Overviews 2. Mobile is a particular concern, with zero-click rates of 71.8% versus 54.2% on desktop 3.

What it adds up to

The reasonable conclusion is that AI Overviews are reshuffling search value rather than destroying it evenly. Content built to capture generic informational traffic, such as "what is" explainers, is the most exposed. That traffic was often loosely tied to revenue to begin with.

Brand demand looks considerably more durable, and may even be strengthened. The practical takeaway for answer engine optimization (AEO) is to build demand for the brand itself, so that more users search for it by name. Earning citations, including on the reference and community platforms AI systems favor, is still worth doing. But it should be treated as damage control rather than a way to win back traffic. Many of these figures come from vendors and agencies with an interest in the topic, so the specific percentages deserve caution. The broad pattern, however, appears consistently across sources.