Definition
Click-through rate (CTR) is the percentage of impressions that result in a click: clicks divided by impressions, times 100. In search, it measures how often people who see your result in Google or Bing actually visit your page. A listing with 2,000 impressions and 60 clicks has a 3% CTR.
In Google Search Console, CTR is reported per query, page, country and device in the Performance report. Google's documentation says appearances in AI Overviews and AI Mode are counted in that same report under the 'Web' search type, so AI features are not split out from classic results there.
CTR has changed more since 2024 than in the previous decade, because more answers are given on the results page itself. Several independent datasets point in the same direction:
- Ahrefs compared aggregated desktop Search Console data for 300,000 keywords between December 2023 and December 2025. Position 1 CTR on keywords that now trigger an AI Overview fell from 7.3% to 1.6%, which Ahrefs calculates as about 58% lower than it would have been without the AI Overview. Its earlier, one-year comparison in April 2025 had found 34.5%.
- A Pew Research Center analysis of 900 US adults' browsing in March 2025 found users clicked a traditional result on 8% of visits to results pages with an AI summary, against 15% without one, and clicked a link inside the summary on just 1% of visits.
- Seer Interactive's 2026 update, covering 53 brands and 5.47 million queries through February 2026, found roughly 2.1% CTR for pages cited in an AI Overview, 0.9% for uncited pages on the same results, and about 3.3% on searches with no AI Overview.
The pattern is a redistribution, not only a decline. Being cited inside an AI Overview keeps more clicks than ranking below it uncited, and searches without AI Overviews have become relatively more valuable. Google, for its part, says it sends billions of clicks to websites every week through AI features and that these clicks are higher quality, meaning visitors spend more time on the site.
For AI search and GEO, CTR is now one signal among several. A page can lose clicks while gaining visibility, because more people see your brand in an AI answer without clicking (zero-click search). Teams that report only CTR will see a decline even when their brand is shown more often.
In practice, segment Search Console queries by whether they trigger an AI Overview and benchmark CTR separately for each group. For your most valuable queries, aim to be one of the sources cited in the AI Overview, since cited pages keep more clicks. Write titles and descriptions that promise something the summary cannot give, such as original data, tools, pricing detail or a full walkthrough, and use structured data where it earns rich results. Then report CTR next to impressions, AI citations and conversions, so a lower CTR with steady conversions is read correctly.
Our guide to optimizing for Google AI Overviews covers how to get cited in the summary itself.
Examples of Click-Through Rate (CTR)
- A publisher splits its Search Console queries into those with and without AI Overviews and finds a 1.4% CTR on the first group against 4.1% on the second, so it stops comparing the two in one average.
- An e-commerce site loses clicks on 'how to choose running shoes' but becomes a cited source in the AI Overview, and its clicks from that query recover partially within a month.
- A B2B team rewrites title tags on comparison pages to promise pricing tables and test results that AI summaries do not show, lifting CTR on those queries from 2.2% to 3.5%.
- A marketing lead adds AI citation counts and branded search volume to the monthly report so a falling CTR is not mistaken for a loss of overall visibility.
