How much traffic does Google's first result lose when an AI summary appears?

When Google shows an AI-generated summary (AI Overview) above the results, the first organic link loses between 52% and 60% of its clicks. That is the conclusion of three studies published in 2026 with hundreds of millions of searches: Advanced Web Ranking measures a 52% drop in the United States, Ahrefs 58% and Sistrix almost 60% in Germany. Put simply, the traffic Google's first result loses is more than half of what it would get without the summary.

-52%

Advanced Web Ranking

from 20.02% to 9.69% CTR

-58%

Ahrefs

versus the expected CTR without a summary

from 27% to 11%

Sistrix

almost 60% fewer clicks

Source: Advanced Web Ranking (US, desktop, July 2026), Ahrefs (300,000 keywords, Dec. 2025) and Sistrix (Germany, Feb. 2026)

View the data as a table

Advanced Web Ranking	-52% | from 20.02% to 9.69% CTR
Ahrefs	-58% | versus the expected CTR without a summary
Sistrix	from 27% to 11% | almost 60% fewer clicks

What the three studies say about position 1

All three studies measure the same thing, the CTR (share of people who click) of the first result with and without an AI summary, but with different samples:

Study	Market and data	Sample	CTR without summary	CTR with summary	Drop
Advanced Web Ranking	US, desktop, July 2026	Over 1.75 million results pages a month	20.02%	9.69%	-52%
Advanced Web Ranking	US, mobile, July 2026	Same	35.74%	12.02%	-66%
Sistrix	Germany, February 2026	Over 100 million keywords	Over 27%	11%	Almost -60%
Ahrefs	Global, desktop, December 2025	300,000 keywords	3.7% (expected)	1.6%	-58%

• Without AI summary
• With AI summary

US, mobile (AWR)35.74%12.02%

Germany (Sistrix)27%11%

US, desktop (AWR)20.02%9.69%

Source: Advanced Web Ranking, July 2026, and Sistrix, February 2026

View the data as a table

	Without AI summary	With AI summary
US, mobile (AWR)	35.74%	12.02%
Germany (Sistrix)	27%	11%
US, desktop (AWR)	20.02%	9.69%

Why is Ahrefs' CTR so low? Because it aggregates Search Console data from a huge number of keywords, including those that get almost no clicks. What is comparable across studies is not the absolute CTR but the relative drop, and there all three agree: more than half.

Ahrefs also shows that the drop is accelerating. In its first study, in April 2025, the first result's loss was 34.5%. In the February 2026 update it reached 58%.

How many visits the first result loses, in practice

To turn percentages into visits, take a search with 10,000 queries a month and use Sistrix's averages:

Scenario	Position 1 CTR	Visits per month
Without AI summary	27%	2,700
With AI summary	11%	1,100
Difference	-16 points	-1,600 visits

In other words, the traffic Google's first result loses on that search is almost six out of ten visits. On mobile, with Advanced Web Ranking's data, the gap is even larger: from 3,574 to 1,202 visits.

But not every search shows a summary. Sistrix found AI summaries on just over 20% of keywords in Germany and estimates that, across all of them, the market loses 6.6% of its organic clicks: 265 million a month. In addition, 78.6% of summaries appear above the organic results, which is exactly what pushes the first link down.

Positions 2 and 3 lose too

First place is not the only one affected. In Advanced Web Ranking's data (desktop, July 2026), position 2 drops from 10.36% to 3.69% CTR (-64%) and position 3 from 3.89% to 1.70% (-56%). In the Ahrefs study, the loss is 50.8% at position 2 and shrinks to 19.4% at position 10.

Why the studies do not fully agree

• Market and device: on mobile, the summary takes up almost the whole screen, and the drop is bigger.
• Query type: informational questions ("what is", "how to") show more summaries than brand or purchase searches. Sistrix found losses of around 1% for recipe sites and over 24% for parenting sites.
• Month measured: the data change a lot. Seer Interactive, with 5.47 million queries from 53 brands, saw organic CTR on searches with a summary rise from 1.31% in December 2025 to 2.36% in February 2026, though it is still below the 3.82% on searches without one.

None of these studies measures Chile. The closest data are from the United States and Germany, so it is worth checking your own figures in Search Console.

What Google says

Google disputes these measurements. In August 2025, Liz Reid, head of Google Search, wrote on the Google blog that total organic click volume to websites has been "relatively stable" year over year, and that third-party studies are often based on flawed methodologies or on traffic changes that predate AI features. Both things can be true at once: the total can hold steady while the first result of a specific search loses clicks.

How to measure the traffic Google's first result loses on your site

1. Identify your searches in position 1. In Search Console's Performance report, filter by an average position close to 1. We explain how in our article on SEO metrics.
2. Search for those queries on Google and note which ones show an AI summary.
3. Compare the CTR of those searches before and after the summary appeared.
4. Check whether AI can cite your site with our free AI Checker: Seer found that brands cited inside the summary have a higher organic CTR (0.95% versus 0.55% in December 2025).

For the full picture of AI summaries, beyond the first result, read AI Overviews by the numbers.