-34.5%lower desktop click rate for the top-ranking page when an AI Overview showed, March 2025 vs a forecast without one

Publisher

Ahrefs, AI Overviews click-through studies

Source type

Vendor data: A company measuring its own customers or panel

What it measures

-34.5% lower desktop click rate for the top-ranking page when an AI Overview showed, March 2025 vs a forecast without one

Data period

Mar 2025 (ends 31 Mar 2025)

Published by the source

17 Apr 2025

Who is counted

300,000 keywords from Ahrefs Keywords Explorer

In the source's words

We analyzed 300,000 keywords and found that the presence of an AI Overview in the search results correlated with a 34.5% lower average clickthrough rate (CTR) for the top-ranking page, compared to similar informational keywords without an AI Overview.

Checked at source

23 Oct 2026: Read on ahrefs.com (vendor study). Desktop CTR from aggregated Google Search Console data, March 2024 vs March 2025. Superseded by the Feb 2026 update; different baseline.

Reuse

Cite with attribution. Vendor study; do not copy charts.

Next expected update

Irregular (Ahrefs, irregular (Apr 2025, Feb 2026))

Original page

ahrefs.com: AI Overviews click-through studies

Data files

CSV · JSON (stable links)

• 23 Oct 2026CorrectionWording corrected to match the source: added that this is the desktop click rate

APA

MLA

HTML link

This stat has no chart to embed yet. Link to this page instead: https://digitaltreed.com/statistics/ai-search/ai-overview-top-result-ctr-drop-2025