Research / AI Overviews and click-through rates
AI Overviews and click-through rates: what small UK B2B businesses lose (and keep)
By Olly, founder of AEOscore, AEO consultant and full-stack developer, 20+ years in search14 min read
Last updated 17 August 2026. Every figure is dated and linked to its source; our own numbers come with the query list and the script.
The short answer
The data
What the data says
These are the figures engines and practitioners keep quoting, with the source, the date and what each one measured. They are not one series: different samples, periods and countries. Ours is last, and it is the only UK B2B row.
| Figure | What it measured | Source | Date |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1.76% to 0.61% | Organic click-through rate on queries showing an AI Overview, June 2024 to September 2025, a 61% fall. 3,119 informational terms, 42 organisations, 25.1M impressions. | Seer Interactive | Published November 2025 |
| 2.07% vs 0.94% vs 3.35% | 2025 average organic CTR on informational queries when the brand is cited in the AI Overview, not cited, and when no AI Overview shows. 53 brands, 5.47M queries, 2.43B impressions. Same report: AIO-present CTR recovered from a 1.3% floor in December 2025 to 2.4% in February 2026. | Seer Interactive | Published April 2026 |
| 8% vs 15% | Share of visits where a US Google user clicked a traditional result when an AI summary appeared versus when it did not; users ended the session on 26% of pages with a summary versus 16% without; 1% clicked a source inside the summary. 900 adults, 68,879 searches, March 2025. | Pew Research Center | Published July 2025 |
| 41%, then 39.8% fewer clicks | AI Overviews appeared on 41% of observed searches; hiding them raised outbound organic clicks from 0.37 to 0.62 per search (AI Overviews cut clicks by 39.8%) and cut zero-click searches by 34.5%. Randomised field experiment, 1,065 US desktop users, January to February 2026. SSRN working paper, not yet peer reviewed. | Agarwal (ISB) and Sen (Carnegie Mellon) | Revised June 2026 |
| -58% at position 1 | Position-1 click-through rate on keywords with an AI Overview, December 2023 versus December 2025 (7.6% to 1.6%). 300,000 keywords, desktop Search Console data. The April 2025 version of the same study measured -34.5%. | Ahrefs | Published February 2026 |
| 21.4% vs 4.3% vs 2.1% | Share of US desktop results pages showing an AI Overview for informational, commercial and transactional keywords (navigational 0.9%). 146.1M SERPs, September 2025. Non-branded 24.9% versus branded 13.1%. | Ahrefs | Published November 2025 |
| Around 30% | "Around 30% of keyword search queries deliver AI-supported overviews" in the UK, and 53% of UK people say they often see AI summaries. Up to 34% of non-branded searches include an AI Overview. | Ofcom, Online Nation 2025 | Published December 2025 |
| 71% overall; 100% vs 60% vs 4% | Share of UK B2B queries showing a Google AI Overview: all 304 queries, then "what is" queries, supplier-intent queries and "near me" queries. Desktop, United Kingdom, one run on 17 August 2026. Full breakdown by intent and sector below. | AEOscore (this page) | 17 August 2026 |
Do AI Overviews reduce click-through rates?
Yes: Seer Interactive found organic click-through rate on queries showing an AI Overview fell to 0.61% by September 2025 from 1.76% in June 2024, a decline of around 61% (published November 2025), and Pew Research Center found US users clicked a traditional result on 8% of visits with an AI summary against 15% without (March 2025 data).
Seer’s November 2025 report tracked 3,119 informational search terms across 42 organisations from June 2024 to September 2025: organic click-through on the queries that showed an AI Overview fell from 1.76% to 0.61%, and paid click-through on the same queries fell from 19.70% to 6.34%. Queries with no AI Overview also lost ground (2.72% to 1.62%), so part of the fall is Google’s results page changing around the AI Overview, not the AI Overview alone.
Pew Research Center watched real browsing rather than Search Console. Across 68,879 Google searches by 900 US adults in March 2025, people clicked a traditional result on 8% of visits when an AI summary appeared and 15% when it did not; they ended the session on 26% of pages with a summary against 16% without; and they clicked a source inside the summary on 1% of visits.
The randomised field experiment by Saharsh Agarwal (Indian School of Business) and Ananya Sen (Carnegie Mellon), an SSRN working paper revised in June 2026 and not yet peer reviewed, is the closest thing to a controlled test: hiding AI Overviews for 374 US desktop users raised outbound organic clicks from 0.37 to 0.62 per search on the queries that would have shown one, which the authors state as AI Overviews reducing clicks by 39.8%.
How much traffic will a small UK B2B business actually lose?
Most small UK B2B sites lose a meaningful share of informational and comparison traffic, where our UK sample found an AI Overview on 100% and 88% of queries, and far less of local and brand-name traffic, where AI Overviews appeared on 4% of "near me" searches and 6% of brand searches; supplier-intent queries sit in between at 60%.
Nearly every published figure blends consumer and informational searches. Seer’s 2025 series is explicitly informational; Pew’s panel is ordinary US adults searching for anything; Ahrefs’ 300,000-keyword set is 99% informational by its own description. A small UK B2B firm does not earn its enquiries from those searches. It earns them from someone typing a service, a place, a price or a company name.
On “what is”, “how to” and “best X” searches, expect the published losses in full: our UK sample found an AI Overview on 100%, 100% and 88% of those queries respectively. On “near me” and city searches (4%) and brand-name searches (6%) the click is largely still yours. Supplier-intent queries such as “IT support company for small business UK” sit in between at 60%, and pricing queries at 96%: higher than the US aggregate figures suggest.
Two US-wide measurements put commercial trigger rates far lower: Ahrefs found AI Overviews on 21.4% of informational, 4.3% of commercial and 2.1% of transactional US desktop results pages in September 2025, and Seer’s February 2026 snapshot found 36% informational, 8% commercial and 5% transactional. Our sample is small and UK B2B specific, and it says the gap between research and buying queries is real but narrower for a UK supplier than those figures imply. Semrush’s July 2026 commercial study points the same way: commercial results pages showing an AI Overview rose 71% between November 2025 and April 2026.
Do AI Overviews reduce my organic leads as well as my traffic?
Not usually in proportion: lost clicks are concentrated in early-stage research visits, so enquiry volume typically falls more slowly than sessions, and enquiry quality often holds steady or improves; that is what we see in audits rather than a published measurement, so count enquiries by month rather than assume it.
A B2B enquiry rarely starts from a definition search. The visits AI Overviews remove are mostly the ones that would have bounced anyway: a reader learning what professional indemnity insurance is, not one choosing a broker. When those visits go, sessions fall, bounce rate improves, and the enquiry count moves much less.
The exception is a business whose enquiries genuinely start from educational content, such as a consultancy that wins clients through guides. There the loss is real and the fix is to be the source the AI Overview quotes: Seer’s 2026 data puts organic click-through on informational queries at 2.07% when your brand is cited in the AI Overview against 0.94% when it is not.
None of this is a published measurement of UK B2B enquiries; it is what we see in audits, and it is why the measurement guide counts enquiries by month alongside sessions rather than assuming either.
Which B2B search queries trigger AI Overviews most often?
In our 304-query UK B2B sample (17 August 2026), definition, how-to and comparison queries showed an AI Overview 100%, 100% and 88% of the time, pricing queries 96% and supplier-intent queries 60%, while "near me" and city searches showed one 4% of the time and brand-name searches 6%; Seer's February 2026 data agrees on the order: comparison 95.4%, question format 85.9%, transactional 5%.
Our UK B2B sample: 304 queries, 17 August 2026
We wrote 304 searches a small UK B2B buyer would actually type, six per intent per sector across eight sectors, plus 16 brand-name searches as a control, and fetched each one from Google UK on 17 August 2026 to see whether an AI Overview showed. Overall, 216 of 304 (71%) did.
| Query type | Example queries | Queries | With AI Overview | Share | Sources cited (avg) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Informational (what is, how does) | "what is professional indemnity insurance", "how does customs clearance work after brexit" | 48 | 48 | 100% | 8.9 |
| How-to | "how to switch accountants", "how to get cyber essentials certified" | 48 | 48 | 100% | 10.5 |
| Comparison (X vs Y, best X for) | "xero vs quickbooks for small business uk", "best crm for small business uk" | 48 | 42 | 88% | 10.3 |
| Commercial, supplier intent | "it support company for small business uk", "commercial insurance broker uk" | 48 | 29 | 60% | 10.2 |
| Pricing and product-specific | "how much does an accountant cost for a small business uk", "cyber essentials cost" | 48 | 46 | 96% | 11.7 |
| Local (near me, in Manchester) | "accountants near me", "commercial cleaning glasgow" | 48 | 2 | 4% | 9.5 |
| Branded (navigational control) | "xero", "simply business", "peninsula hr" | 16 | 1 | 6% | 13 |
| All queries | 304 | 216 | 71% |
By sector
| Sector | Queries | With AI Overview | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Accountancy and bookkeeping | 36 | 27 | 75% |
| Commercial insurance | 36 | 29 | 81% |
| IT support and managed services | 36 | 28 | 78% |
| Industrial and engineering supply | 36 | 25 | 69% |
| Facilities and commercial cleaning | 36 | 22 | 61% |
| B2B software | 36 | 28 | 78% |
| Employment law and HR consultancy | 36 | 28 | 78% |
| Freight and logistics | 36 | 28 | 78% |
| Branded control (all sectors) | 16 | 1 | 6% |
Method
- 304 hand-written queries across eight small-UK-B2B sectors: accountancy and bookkeeping; commercial insurance; IT support and managed services; industrial and engineering supply; facilities and commercial cleaning; B2B software; employment law and HR consultancy; freight and logistics.
- Six queries per intent bucket per sector: informational (what is, how does), how-to, comparison (X vs Y, best X for), commercial supplier-intent (X provider UK, X company for small business), pricing and product-specific (X cost UK), local (X near me, X in Manchester). Plus 16 branded UK B2B names as a navigational control.
- Each query fetched once through the DataForSEO SERP API (Google organic, live advanced, AI Overview loading enabled), location United Kingdom, English, desktop, on 17 August 2026.
- A query counts as "AI Overview present" if the results page contains an AI Overview block. We also recorded how many distinct source URLs each AI Overview cited.
- The query list, the per-query results and the script are published as plain files (linked in the sources at the foot of this page) so the run can be checked and repeated.
Caveats
- One run on one date. Google dials AI Overview coverage up and down, so a re-run next month will not match to the point.
- Desktop only, one national location. "Near me" queries return the national default rather than a city, so the local bucket understates what a phone in Leeds would see.
- 48 queries per bucket (16 for the branded control) is small. Treat any gap under about ten percentage points as noise.
- The sample is our judgement of realistic queries, not weighted by search volume. It answers "how often does this kind of query trigger an AI Overview", not "what share of your traffic is affected".
The supplier-intent queries that did not trigger were mostly plain supplier-type nouns (“cnc machining services uk”, “commercial insurance broker uk”, “office cleaning contractor uk”), which Google still answers with a list of companies; add “for small business” or a problem to the query and the AI Overview usually appears. “Best [supplier type] companies uk” list queries also skipped more often than other comparison queries. The pattern matches the larger US datasets on ordering and disagrees on level. Seer’s February 2026 snapshot: comparison queries trigger an AI Overview 95.4% of the time, question-format 85.9%, price and cost queries 83.4%, near-me 76.9%, single-word queries 27.3%, transactional 5%. Ahrefs, September 2025: non-branded 24.9% against branded 13.1%. For a UK supplier the click is safest when the searcher already knows who or where they want.
“When I audit a small UK B2B site the pattern is nearly always the same: the "what is" and "how does" pages have kept their rankings and lost a third of their clicks, the service and pricing pages have barely moved, and nobody has noticed because they only look at total sessions. The number I now watch first is searches for the company name.”
Is being cited in an AI Overview worth more than ranking first?
A citation earns brand exposure and downstream branded search but far fewer immediate clicks than a traditional first position: Seer Interactive's 2026 data puts organic click-through on informational queries at 2.07% when your brand is cited in the AI Overview against 3.35% when no AI Overview shows, so track citations and rankings as separate outcomes rather than treating one as a replacement for the other.
Seer’s April 2026 report is the cleanest comparison. On informational queries across 2025, organic click-through averaged 3.35% when no AI Overview appeared, 2.07% when one appeared and cited the brand, and 0.94% when one appeared and did not. Being cited more than doubles your clicks against not being cited, and still leaves you 38% short of a results page with no AI Overview at all. In the November 2025 series, cited brands earned 35% more organic clicks than uncited ones.
What a citation buys that a ranking does not is the name in front of the reader at the moment they are forming a shortlist, whether or not they click. That shows up later as a search for your company by name, which is why branded search volume is the leading indicator we tell clients to watch. Track rankings, citations and branded searches separately.
How do I measure lost clicks from AI Overviews in Search Console and GA4?
Look for pages where impressions and average position are stable but clicks have fallen: that gap is the clearest available signal of AI Overview interception, because Google includes AI Overview clicks in the ordinary Web search type in Search Console and, since June 2026, shows some sites AI Overview impressions but never clicks on their own.
Google’s own documentation says traffic from AI Overviews and AI Mode is included in the Search Console Performance report within the Web search type, and that all links in an AI Overview share a single position. Since 3 June 2026 a subset of sites can see an impressions-only view for AI Overviews and AI Mode; it has no clicks, click-through rate or position. So the signal you have is indirect: a page whose average position is within a place of last year and whose impressions held or rose, but whose clicks fell by a fifth or more.
In GA4, the same page’s organic sessions fall while its conversion count moves less. Ask every new enquiry how they heard of you and give “an AI assistant” as an option. The step-by-step, written for someone who is not technical, is in How to measure AI Overview click loss in Search Console and GA4.
What should a small UK B2B business do first?
Protect and strengthen the commercial pages that convert, rebuild informational content so it is quotable in AI answers, and start tracking branded search volume as your new leading indicator; do those three in that order before anything else.
Triage bottom-of-funnel first. Location and brand searches are the ones AI Overviews intercept least, and where they do appear on supplier searches (60% of supplier-intent queries in our sample) the click still goes to the page that gives what a summary cannot: a price, a named person, proof, availability, a place. Make the service, sector and location pages that produce enquiries current, specific and fast before touching anything else.
Then rebuild top-of-funnel content to be quoted rather than clicked: a direct answer under every heading, dated figures with sources, tables, a named author. Then get your name into the sources engines read: trade directories, professional bodies, review sites, comparison pages, LinkedIn from a named person. Then track branded search monthly. The full list, in order, is in How to protect B2B leads from AI Overviews.
Will this get worse?
Plan for further erosion of informational traffic rather than a return to previous levels: AI Overview coverage has expanded since 2024, a randomised field experiment by Agarwal and Sen (SSRN working paper, revised June 2026) found AI Overviews on 41% of US searches, and Google dials coverage up and down month to month, so the trend is up but not smooth.
Coverage is rising but jagged. Semrush’s US tracking put the share of keywords showing an AI Overview at 6.49% in January 2025, 24.61% in July 2025 and 15.69% in November 2025. Ofcom reported in December 2025 that around 30% of keyword search queries in the UK deliver AI-supported overviews and 53% of UK people say they often see AI summaries. Agarwal and Sen observed AI Overviews on 41% of their participants’ US searches in January and February 2026. Seer’s April 2026 report also recorded a partial recovery in click-through, from a 1.3% floor in December 2025 to 2.4% in February 2026, so keep measuring.
For a small UK B2B firm the planning assumption is that research-stage clicks do not come back, supplier clicks have to be earned page by page, and brand-name searches stay yours.
Where AEOscore fits
What we do about it, briefly
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Sources and methodology
Sources
- AIO impact on Google CTR: September 2025 update. Seer Interactive, 4 November 2025. 3,119 informational terms, 42 organisations, June 2024 to September 2025.
- AIO impact on Google CTR: 2026 update. Seer Interactive, 24 April 2026. 53 brands, 5.47M queries, January 2025 to February 2026; includes trigger rates by query type from a February 2026 snapshot.
- Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results. Pew Research Center, 22 July 2025. 900 US adults, 68,879 searches, March 2025 browsing data.
- The impact of Google AI Overviews on publisher traffic and user experience: evidence from a field experiment. Saharsh Agarwal (Indian School of Business) and Ananya Sen (Carnegie Mellon University), SSRN, Posted 3 April 2026, revised 17 June 2026. Pre-registered randomised experiment, 1,065 US participants, 68,089 searches. Working paper, not yet peer reviewed.
- AI Overviews reduce clicks by 58% (update). Ahrefs, 4 February 2026. 300,000 keywords, December 2023 versus December 2025. Original April 2025 study: https://ahrefs.com/blog/ai-overviews-reduce-clicks/
- What triggers AI Overviews?. Ahrefs, 10 November 2025. 146.1M US desktop SERPs, September 2025, trigger rates by intent.
- Semrush AI Overviews study. Semrush, Updated to November 2025 data. Share of US keywords triggering an AI Overview: 6.49% (January 2025), 24.61% (July 2025), 15.69% (November 2025).
- AI Overviews in commercial search. Semrush, 2 July 2026. 600,000 US desktop keywords, November 2025 to April 2026: commercial results pages with an AI Overview up 71%.
- Online Nation 2025. Ofcom, 10 December 2025. UK. Around 30% of keyword search queries deliver AI-supported overviews.
- AIO frequency rises sharply, featured snippets dropping in UK. SISTRIX, 26 March 2025. AI Overviews on over 18% of UK keywords analysed, up from 4%; commercial sets much lower.
- Google AI Overviews drive 61% drop in organic CTR, 68% in paid. Search Engine Land, 4 November 2025.
- Google zero-click searches reach 68% in early 2026: study. Search Engine Land, 9 June 2026. SparkToro and Similarweb clickstream, US, January to April 2026.
- AI features and your website. Google Search Central, Updated 10 December 2025. AI Overview and AI Mode traffic is included in the Search Console Performance report under the Web search type, not separated.
- Introducing Search generative AI performance reports in Search Console. Google Search Central blog, 3 June 2026. Impressions-only view for AI Overviews and AI Mode combined, rolling out to a subset of sites. No clicks, CTR or position.
- UK B2B AI Overview trigger-rate study: query list, per-query results and script. AEOscore, 17 August 2026. 304 queries, DataForSEO SERP API, United Kingdom, desktop. Per-query CSV at that link; bucket and sector totals at https://aeoscore.co.uk/research/files/aio-uk-b2b-study-2026-08-17-summary.json; the script that produced them at https://aeoscore.co.uk/research/files/aio-uk-study-2026-08-17.mjs.txt
How we produced our own number
The UK B2B sample above was designed and run by Olly on 17 August 2026. The per-query results, the bucket and sector totals and the script that produced them are published as plain files (last source above) so anyone can check the classification or repeat the run. We will re-run it quarterly and keep every dated result on this page.
Third-party figures were checked against their primary source on 17 August 2026. Where a publisher has issued more than one study we cite each separately with its date and do not join them into one series. Corrections to hello@aeoscore.co.uk.
Last updated 17 August 2026.
What changed on this page
- : Review pass: pricing references brought up to the current offer and page metadata tightened.
- : Page published: the 304-query UK B2B study, with the Seer Interactive, Pew Research and Ahrefs figures attributed and dated.
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