68% zero-click, 58% CTR drop from AIO... but some data says clicks are going UP? What are you actually seeing?

Been digging through the 2026 search and AI citation studies, and the numbers are all over the place. Wanted to put it all in one thread and hear what you guys are seeing in your own GSC.

1. Zero-click: depends who you ask

• SparkToro (Similarweb panel, Jan–Apr 2026): 68.01% of US Google searches ended without a click. The share of searches producing a click dropped 22.9% from 2024.
• Mobile is brutal: around 77% zero-click on mobile vs around 51% on desktop.
• BUT Datos (Q1 2026) says the opposite. US zero-click fell from 24.5% to 22.4% between Dec 2025 and Mar 2026, and organic click share went UP to 44.9%.

Same market, totally different picture. Different panels and definitions, obviously, but which one matches your sites?

2. AI Overviews vs position 1

• Ahrefs (300K keywords): AIO correlates with a 58% CTR drop for #1 rankings. Was 34.5% about 18 months earlier.
• A causal study on 1,065 Chrome users found a 39.8% drop in outbound clicks.
• Seer Interactive says it’s recovering a bit: AIO CTR bottomed at 1.3% in Dec 2025 and climbed to 2.4% by Feb 2026.
• Interesting one from Seer: brands cited inside the AIO got a 15.74% paid CTR on the same queries vs 11.19% when not cited.

3. AI citations: who actually gets cited

• Citations per answer (118K responses analyzed): Perplexity ~21.9, AI Mode ~8.3, ChatGPT ~7.9, Claude ~5.7.
• Only 11% of domains get cited by BOTH ChatGPT and Perplexity. Ranking on one tells you almost nothing about the other.
• Top 15 domains take around 68% of all AI citation share. Reddit shows up in about 40% of generative answers.
• Evertune: 50% of ChatGPT citations are listicles. The typical cited page is around 941 words with 4 H2s, 2 H3s, 15 external links, and 10 images.
• 32% of AI-cited domains are earned media (7% to 87% depending on niche). So guest posts and PR placements might matter more than people think.

4. AI referral traffic converts better

• ChatGPT drives about 87% of AI referral traffic. Perplexity about 2.8%, Gemini about 4.7%.
• Seer conversion rates: ChatGPT 15.9%, Perplexity 10.5%, Claude 5.0%, Gemini 3.0%, Google organic 1.76%.

Low volume, but if those conversion numbers hold, a handful of AI referrals could be worth more than a pile of informational organic clicks.

What I want to know from you guys:

1. Is your GSC showing the impressions-up, clicks-down pattern, or are clicks recovering like Datos/Seer suggest?
2. Anyone actually tracking AI citations? Which tool, and is it worth it?
3. Has anyone tested listicle-style formatting specifically to get picked up by ChatGPT?
4. Is Reddit/community seeding working for AI visibility, or is it mostly noise?
5. Are you still chasing informational KWs, or shifting to commercial and transactional?

Drop your numbers. Even rough ones help.

Agree on the niche/intent part, that lines up with the data too. Informational is where it hurts most: the mobile zero-click rate on informational searches is reportedly around 84%, while branded, local and transactional queries hold up much better.

Also agree on not dropping conventional SEO for AI. One study found most AI-cited sites have no special GEO optimization at all; they get cited mainly because they already rank top 3 for the query. So solid rankings are still the foundation for getting cited in the first place.

I think the studies disagree because they lump query types together. Split your GSC queries into informational, commercial and branded and compare CTR before and after AIO for each group separately. The blended number averages everything out.

I have seen the same split RoyRoyan described. When I separate queries in Search Console, informational terms show more impressions with fewer clicks, while branded and commercial terms hold up much better. That makes the blended CTR number hard to trust on its own.

I agree with gary2 that strong rankings still matter for citations. The pages I see cited most often are usually the ones already ranking well, with a clear answer near the top. I have not changed pages into listicles only for ChatGPT, but I do use short lists and clear headings when the query suits that format.

For now I would keep informational content, but judge it by assisted value and citations rather than clicks alone, and put more effort into commercial pages where a click still leads to an action.

gary2 said:

Been digging through the 2026 search and AI citation studies, and the numbers are all over the place. Wanted to put it all in one thread and hear what you guys are seeing in your own GSC.

1. Zero-click: depends who you ask

• SparkToro (Similarweb panel, Jan–Apr 2026): 68.01% of US Google searches ended without a click. The share of searches producing a click dropped 22.9% from 2024.
• Mobile is brutal: around 77% zero-click on mobile vs around 51% on desktop.
• BUT Datos (Q1 2026) says the opposite. US zero-click fell from 24.5% to 22.4% between Dec 2025 and Mar 2026, and organic click share went UP to 44.9%.

Same market, totally different picture. Different panels and definitions, obviously, but which one matches your sites?

2. AI Overviews vs position 1

• Ahrefs (300K keywords): AIO correlates with a 58% CTR drop for #1 rankings. Was 34.5% about 18 months earlier.
• A causal study on 1,065 Chrome users found a 39.8% drop in outbound clicks.
• Seer Interactive says it’s recovering a bit: AIO CTR bottomed at 1.3% in Dec 2025 and climbed to 2.4% by Feb 2026.
• Interesting one from Seer: brands cited inside the AIO got a 15.74% paid CTR on the same queries vs 11.19% when not cited.

3. AI citations: who actually gets cited

• Citations per answer (118K responses analyzed): Perplexity ~21.9, AI Mode ~8.3, ChatGPT ~7.9, Claude ~5.7.
• Only 11% of domains get cited by BOTH ChatGPT and Perplexity. Ranking on one tells you almost nothing about the other.
• Top 15 domains take around 68% of all AI citation share. Reddit shows up in about 40% of generative answers.
• Evertune: 50% of ChatGPT citations are listicles. The typical cited page is around 941 words with 4 H2s, 2 H3s, 15 external links, and 10 images.
• 32% of AI-cited domains are earned media (7% to 87% depending on niche). So guest posts and PR placements might matter more than people think.

4. AI referral traffic converts better

• ChatGPT drives about 87% of AI referral traffic. Perplexity about 2.8%, Gemini about 4.7%.
• Seer conversion rates: ChatGPT 15.9%, Perplexity 10.5%, Claude 5.0%, Gemini 3.0%, Google organic 1.76%.

Low volume, but if those conversion numbers hold, a handful of AI referrals could be worth more than a pile of informational organic clicks.

What I want to know from you guys:

1. Is your GSC showing the impressions-up, clicks-down pattern, or are clicks recovering like Datos/Seer suggest?
2. Anyone actually tracking AI citations? Which tool, and is it worth it?
3. Has anyone tested listicle-style formatting specifically to get picked up by ChatGPT?
4. Is Reddit/community seeding working for AI visibility, or is it mostly noise?
5. Are you still chasing informational KWs, or shifting to commercial and transactional?

Drop your numbers. Even rough ones help.

Click to expand...

Bottom line to all of these is that AI overview is bad news for websites.

At this point, it might be much more worth it to optimize for ChatGPT than for Google. Either way, AI is bad news.

In a few months time, we'll see more data that'll point to the same thing, there won't be significant change.

zero click is real on my end too lol, but some informational pages still pull clicks fine. i stopped trusting the headline stats and just check my own search console tbh