Google AI Overviews now answer close to half of all searches

Two years after launch, Google's AI Overviews have gone from an experimental SERP feature to the default way a huge share of searches get answered.

Independent trackers now put the trigger rate at roughly 48% of monitored queries — a jump of about 58% from a year earlier — and the feature has expanded to more than 200 countries and 40-plus languages.

The effect on organic traffic is not subtle. Ahrefs' analysis found a 34.5% drop in click-through rate for the position that used to be the safest real estate on the page — the #1 organic result — once an AI Overview appears above it.

Pew Research, working from a much larger sample of 68,000 real queries, measured a 46.7% relative decline in clicks to any organic result when an AI Overview is present. For publishers whose business model still assumes a click, that's not a rounding error.

Being cited inside the AI Overview is a completely different experience than being displaced by it. Brands that do get pulled into the generated answer see roughly 120% more organic clicks per impression than competitors who rank for the same query but aren't quoted.

In other words, the traffic didn't disappear — it consolidated around whichever source Google's summarization model decided was worth quoting. Which sources get quoted comes down to the same retrieval and extractability signals an AI Readiness check measures: is the answer stated clearly enough, near enough to the question, for a model to lift it with confidence.