Where the clicks go: position by position

A page that ranks first on Google no longer captures what “first” used to mean. Averaged across roughly 80 million keywords, the top organic result claims 28.5% of mobile clicks — more than ten times the 2.5% that lands on position ten, according to Sistrix’s 2025 click-curve analysis. That curve was already steep before Google started answering questions itself. Once an AI Overview appears above the results, Ahrefs finds the same position-one page loses 58% of the clicks it would otherwise earn, and the loss shrinks, rather than grows, further down the page.

This brief maps that redistribution using four independently collected datasets from two markets — the shape of the click curve without an AI Overview, how the curve compresses when one appears, and where, if anywhere, the missing clicks go.

The clean curve before the answer box

Sistrix’s baseline, built from Google Search Console data across roughly 80 million keywords, shows position one on mobile taking 28.5% of clicks, position two 15.7%, position three 11%, and position ten 2.5%. Even before generative answers, other SERP features already ate into that curve: a knowledge panel cuts position-one clicks to 16.7% and a Google Shopping module to 13.7%, while sitelinks push it up to 46.9%. The AI Overview is not the first thing to compress organic clicks — it is the newest and, on the numbers below, the largest.

Position by position, the AI Overview tax

Ahrefs’ comparison of 150,000 keywords with an AI Overview against 150,000 informational keywords without one — tracked from December 2023 to December 2025 — isolates the effect by rank. The loss is largest at the top and tapers as position falls:

The two columns come from different studies — Sistrix’s baseline is mobile, Ahrefs’ comparison is desktop — so they should be read side by side, not multiplied together. The pattern within Ahrefs’ own data still holds: an AI Overview draws most heavily from exactly the position that would otherwise have answered the query outright. The further a result already sat from the top, the less traffic it had to lose.

The same story on a national scale

Two independent methodologies, in two markets, converge on a similar magnitude. Sistrix’s February 2026 review of more than 100 million German keywords found position-one CTR falling from 27% without an AI Overview to 11% with one, and the share of all searches that end in any organic click dropping from 57% to 33%. Scaled to the German market, Sistrix puts the loss at 265 million organic clicks a month — about 6.6% of national organic click volume, since AI Overviews appear on roughly one in five German queries. The damage is uneven: recipe sites lost about 1% of clicks, parenting and baby sites more than 24%, and specialised health portals up to about 30%.

In the US, Pew Research Center tracked the actual browsing of 900 adults through 68,879 real Google searches in March 2025. When a search produced an AI summary, users clicked a traditional result in 8% of visits; when it did not, they clicked in 15% of visits — a nearly identical relative drop to Sistrix’s German figure, despite Pew measuring individual behaviour rather than aggregated search-console logs. Users were also likelier to abandon the search entirely after seeing a summary: 26% of those visits ended the session, against 16% without one.

The one number moving the other way

One figure in this data set points against the trend. Seer Interactive, tracking 53 brands across 5.47 million queries and 2.43 billion impressions through April 2026, finds organic CTR on AI-Overview queries has climbed from a floor of 1.3% in December 2025 to 2.4% in February 2026 — still 38% below the 3.82% CTR on comparable queries without an Overview, but recovering. The lever behind that partial recovery is citation, not ranking: pages named inside the AI Overview earn 120% more clicks per impression than pages that rank on the same page but go unnamed. Being first is no longer the whole game; being the source the AI Overview quotes increasingly is.

Methodology

Sources

Sistrix, “Why (almost) everything you knew about Google CTR is no longer valid” (baseline mobile CTR curve, ~80M keywords, Google Search Console data, published July 2020, updated July 2025); Sistrix, “AI Overviews in Germany” (100M+ German keywords, published Feb 25 2026, updated Apr 2 2026); Ahrefs, “AI Overviews Reduce Clicks by 58%” (300,000 keywords, 150K with AI Overview / 150K without, aggregated desktop Search Console CTR, Dec 2023 vs Dec 2025, published Feb 4 2026); Pew Research Center, “Do people click on links in Google AI summaries?” (panel of 900 U.S. adults, 68,879 tracked Google searches in March 2025, published July 22 2025); Seer Interactive, “AIO Impact on Google CTR: 2026 Update” (53 brands, 5.47M queries, 2.43B organic impressions, Jan 2025–Feb 2026 actuals, published April 2026).

Scope limits

The Sistrix baseline curve is mobile-only; the Ahrefs position-by-position AI Overview comparison is desktop-only. The two are shown in one table for shape, not combined into a single figure. Sistrix’s national loss estimate (265M clicks/month) covers Germany only and should not be read as a UK/US/EU-wide figure. Pew’s data reflects U.S. adult panelists’ browsing behaviour in a single month (March 2025) and is not a global sample. Seer’s citation-premium figure (+120% clicks per impression when cited) is a correlation across the brands it tracks, not a controlled causal test — cited brands may differ systematically from uncited ones in ways beyond the citation itself.

Updates

This brief will be revised as new data is published. Corrections are handled under our corrections policy.