For two decades, SEO had one rule: rank #1, get the click. That rule is now empirically broken.

The 2024 SparkToro Zero-Click Study - built on clickstream data from Datos (a Semrush company) - found that 58.5% of US Google searches and 59.7% of EU searches now end without a click to the open web (SparkToro, 2024).

Put another way: for every 1,000 US Google searches, only 360 clicks reach the open web (374 in the EU). About 30% of all clicks go to Google-owned properties - YouTube, Maps, Shopping, AI Overviews. The “open web” that traditional SEO was built to capture is now a minority destination.

And the trend is accelerating in 2025–2026.

AI Overviews are the new traffic killer

Google’s AI Overviews - the LLM-generated summaries that now sit at the top of many search results - are the single biggest factor in the latest leg of CTR collapse.

Seer Interactive (September 2025) ran the most comprehensive third-party study to date: 3,119 queries, 42 organizations, 25.1 million organic impressions, 1.1 million paid impressions (Search Engine Land coverage). The findings:

  • Organic CTR on informational queries with AI Overviews fell 61% from mid-2024 to September 2025 (1.76% → 0.61%).
  • Paid CTR fell 68% on the same queries (19.7% → 6.34%).
  • Even on queries WITHOUT AI Overviews, organic CTRs fell 41% in the same period - AI is suppressing clicks across the board.
  • The flip side: being cited inside an AI Overview produces 35% more organic clicks and 91% more paid clicks versus not being cited at all.

That last finding is the entire GEO thesis in a single statistic: the only thing better than ranking is being cited by the AI that ate ranking.

Ahrefs confirms the scale

Ahrefs ran a parallel study and reached the same conclusion via different methodology.

  • March 2025: Presence of AI Overviews reduces top-position CTR by ~34.5% (Ahrefs, March 2025).
  • December 2025 update: That drop has widened to a 58% CTR reduction for the #1 ranked page (Ahrefs, December 2025).

That is not a degradation - it is a halving of the most valuable real estate on the internet, in the space of nine months.

What it looks like inside the publishers

The clearest leading indicator is what’s happening to publishers - the industry whose entire business model depends on Google referral traffic.

Press Gazette’s 2026 report found that global publisher Google traffic dropped ~33% between November 2024 and November 2025, with US publishers down 38% (Press Gazette, 2026).

Chartbeat’s analysis (via Axios, March 2026) is even more brutal, segmented by publisher size:

  • Small publishers: lost 60% of search referral traffic over two years.
  • Medium publishers: lost 47%.
  • Large publishers: lost 22%.

The smaller you are, the more dependent you were on the long-tail organic clicks that AI Overviews are now eating first.

Digiday reports that named publisher casualties in 2025 ranged from a 25% average drop in publisher referrals attributable to AI Overviews specifically, with widely-reported (though aggregator-sourced) declines across major publications. News publishers themselves now expect search referrals to drop 43% by 2029 (Search Engine Land).

The “AI Overviews share” is exploding

It would be one thing if AI Overviews appeared on a small percentage of queries. They don’t.

AI Overviews now appear on ~13.14% of all queries, up from 6.49% in January 2025 (Search Engine Land coverage of Semrush data). McKinsey projects that share will pass 75% of all Google searches by 2028.

When 75% of search results lead with an AI-generated answer that doesn’t require a click, “rank #1 on Google” stops being a meaningful business objective. The objective becomes: be in that AI answer.

What this means for your traffic forecast

If you build a 2026 marketing plan that assumes Google traffic stays flat - let alone grows - the data is telling you that plan is structurally wrong.

Realistic assumptions for any organic traffic forecast through 2028:

  1. Top-position CTR is now ~50% of its 2023 baseline and likely to drop further.
  2. Long-tail informational queries are the first to lose traffic; they convert to AI Overview answers earliest.
  3. Branded queries hold up better than non-branded - entity authority compounds.
  4. AI-cited pages get more clicks than non-cited pages - being in the answer is now worth more than being in position 2.

The brands that get ahead of this aren’t trying to “rank harder.” They are engineering their content, schema, and citations to be the source the AI quotes - and measuring success in cite rate, not click-through rate.

The new traffic metric

Traditional SEO measured success in clicks. The era after AI Overviews measures it in citations - how often your brand and content are named, quoted, or linked inside an AI agent’s answer.

That metric is invisible in Google Analytics. It is measurable only by daily, multi-agent rank tracking across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Grok, and Copilot - the exact discipline that GEO was built around.

The click isn’t coming back. The brands that build for what replaced it will compound visibility through the rest of the decade. The brands that don’t will keep optimizing for a number that, on its current trajectory, halves again by 2027.

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