Ahrefs: AI Overviews cut position-1 CTR by 58%

Ahrefs has now run the same click-through-rate study twice. In April 2025 it reported that pages ranking first in Google lost 34.5% of their click-through rate when an AI Overview appeared above them. In February 2026 it reran the analysis on a longer time window and reported a bigger number: 58%. Both figures are Ahrefs’ own research, built from its own keyword sample and Google Search Console data, not ours.

What Ahrefs actually measured#

A 300,000-keyword sample, split in two. Ahrefs drew 150,000 keywords that showed an AI Overview and 150,000 informational keywords that did not, all from its Keywords Explorer database. For each keyword it pulled aggregated Google Search Console desktop click-through rate for position 1 - clicks divided by impressions - at two points in time, then compared them. Ahrefs writes the result up as a correlation between the AI Overview and the lower CTR.

The updated study used December 2023 and December 2025. For keywords that went on to trigger an AI Overview, position-1 CTR was 7.3% in December 2023 and 1.6% in December 2025. For the informational keywords that never triggered one, CTR fell too, from 7.6% to 3.9% over the same two years. Ahrefs used that second, no-AI-Overview decline to forecast what the AI Overview keywords’ CTR would have been without the feature: 3.7%. The gap between that 3.7% forecast and the actual 1.6% is where the 58% figure comes from.

Two figures, two points in time#

The earlier 34.5% number is not the same measurement, restated. It came from a one-year window, March 2024 to March 2025, run before AI Overviews had reached as many countries and languages. The 58% figure is a fresh run on a two-year window that captures more of the rollout, and Ahrefs frames it as evidence the effect is deepening, not a correction of the earlier number. Cite whichever one matches the period you care about, and say which one you mean - they answer different questions.

What Search Console can’t show#

Correlation across many sites is not a forecast for any one page. Ahrefs’ sample spans 300,000 keywords across many domains; a single article’s click-through rate depends on its own snippet, brand recognition and query intent, none of which this study isolates.

Search Console only reports what reaches it. It shows clicks and impressions for a site’s own organic listing, not what a searcher does inside the AI Overview itself, on Google’s SERP more broadly, or on competitors’ listings. A study built entirely on Search Console data, however large the sample, cannot see behavior that never reaches a publisher’s own property - it can only measure the shrinking slice that does.

Why we care#

The direction of travel matters more than the exact percentage. Two runs of the same study from the same source, about ten months apart, both show position-1 organic CTR falling further as AI Overviews mature. That is a reasonable basis for planning around less click-through from a page-one ranking, even without treating 58% as a number that applies uniformly to your own AI search traffic.

Verify a vendor claim against the study it cites. If you see “AI Overviews cut clicks by X%” without a date range, ask which Ahrefs run it comes from, or whether it is a different source entirely - Ahrefs’ own writeup names several other studies with different methodologies and different numbers, from a roughly 50% CTR drop to one outlet’s claim of 80 to 90%.