AI Overviews Are Eating Your Clicks — How Worried Should You Actually Be?

The study everyone cites

Pew Research Center, published July 2025, based on the browsing data of 900 US adults searching in March 2025:

• Users clicked a traditional result in 8% of searches that showed an AI summary, against 15% without one
• Clicks on links inside the summaries were 1% of visits
• Sessions ended without any further action 26% of the time with a summary, against 16% without
• About 18% of all searches triggered a summary; 58% of users saw at least one

Separately, Ahrefs found AI Overview presence correlated with 34.5% lower average click-through rate, with position-one CTR on affected informational keywords falling from 0.073 to 0.026 between March 2024 and March 2025.

Those are the numbers in every scary headline.

The part the headlines leave out

Google publicly disputed the Pew study, calling the methodology flawed and the query set skewed.

Google is not a neutral party here. But neither is an SEO industry whose business depends on the threat being large. Both sides have an interest.

The limitations that are not in dispute:

• US data. Indian search behaviour was not measured.
• 900 people. Small, even if carefully chosen.
• March 2025. Eighteen months old, in a field that changes quarterly.
• Informational queries drive the effect — questions with a factual answer.

That last point is where this becomes relevant to you, and it is the reason to read the rest of this.

Why your business is probably less exposed than the headlines suggest

AI Overviews answer questions that have answers. What is the capital of Brazil. How many grams in an ounce. What causes rust.

They do not answer: which interior designer in Chennai should I hire.

That query needs a shortlist, photographs, prices, reviews, a phone number. There is no sentence Google can generate that completes it.

So the exposure splits roughly like this:

• High exposure — informational content: what is X, how does Y work, definitions, simple how-tos. If your traffic is mostly this, you have a real problem.
• Low exposure — local intent and commercial intent: agency in Chennai, near me, price, book, hire, best X for Y.
• Effectively none — your brand name, your Google Business Profile, direct traffic.

Most small and medium businesses in Tamil Nadu live almost entirely in the second and third groups. The sky is falling somewhere, but probably not directly overhead.

What it does change

Three real shifts, none of them catastrophic:

Thin informational content is now worthless. The "what is digital marketing" article that brought you a trickle of unqualified traffic is dead. No loss — it never brought a customer.

Traffic volume falls, traffic quality rises. Fewer casual clicks, because the casual question got answered. The people who do click have a reason. If you measure success by sessions, this looks like decline; if you measure by enquiries, it may not be.

Being cited in the summary matters. Clicks inside summaries are only 1% of visits — but appearing as a cited source puts your name in front of someone at the exact moment they are deciding. That is brand value even without the click.

What to do, practically

• Stop writing informational content with no commercial purpose. Write about what you do, what it costs, how it works, who it is for.
• Put real numbers in. Prices, timelines, specifics from your own work. Generated summaries cannot invent your pricing — they can only cite someone who published it.
• Answer questions directly and early, in the first two sentences under a heading. This helps whether a human or a machine is reading.
• Measure enquiries, not sessions. If traffic is down 20% and enquiries are flat, nothing is wrong with your marketing — only with your dashboard.
• Keep the channels that do not depend on Google's layout — your Google Business Profile, your reviews, WhatsApp, email, referrals.

The honest summary

Click-through rates on informational searches are down, significantly, in US data from 2025, by a method Google disputes.

For a service business in Tamil Nadu selling to people who search locally with commercial intent, the effect today is real but modest, and the right response is the same thing that was always right: publish things only you can say, put your prices in writing, collect reviews, and answer the phone.

If an agency quotes you the 34.5% figure and offers an expensive package to solve it, ask them what percentage of your queries trigger AI Overviews. If they have not looked, they are selling a headline.

Related reading

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• Google now answers in Tamil
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