In February, we covered how Google's AI Overviews really hurt the click-through rate of the search results and paid ads. Well, several more recent studies have come out that back up this data.
Danny Goodwin covered two of these new studies on Search Engine Land and wrote, "Google’s AI Overviews are significantly decreasing clicks to traditional organic listings, especially for non-branded, informational queries."
Here are the new data points from the past week or so:
- Ahrefs data shows a 34.5% lower average clickthrough rate (CTR) for the top-ranking page, compared to similar informational keywords without an AI Overview
- Amsive data shows a CTR decline of -15.49% on average when AI Overviews are on the page
- Similarweb data shows 20% fewer clicks on search results with AI Overviews
So now we have like five different sources of data between now and February, all say that AI Overviews lead to significantly lower click-through rates.
Definitely check out each study to dig into the data...
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