About 30% of UK Google searches now show an AI Overview, according to Ofcom's Online Nation 2025 report, and 53% of UK adults say they see the summaries often.
That is the national average. The number that matters to your business is different: how many of the searches that used to send you customers now have one.
Most of the advice on Google AI Overviews is written for US publishers with a million pages. A Northampton accountant or a Leicester kitchen fitter has perhaps 40 queries that matter. This article is about those 40: how to find out which of them trigger an overview, what the click research says will have happened, and what to change.
What the click studies found
Three studies measured the same thing in different ways, and all three found fewer clicks when an AI Overview is on the page. The gap between them is mostly about what was counted.
Pew Research Center tracked 900 US adults through 68,879 real searches in March 2025. When a summary appeared, people clicked a normal result on 8% of visits, against 15% when it did not. Only 1% of visits included a click on a link inside the summary. And 26% of people ended their session on the spot, against 16% without a summary.
Ahrefs took 300,000 keywords and compared Search Console click-through rates for December 2023 against December 2025. For the top-ranking page, an AI Overview correlated with a 58% lower click-through rate than the same kind of informational keyword without one. Their first run in April 2025 had found 34.5%, so the effect got worse over the year.
"For every 100 clicks you could historically earn for a top-ranking page, Google now 'keeps' 58." Ryan Law, Ahrefs, February 2026 update
The same study broke the loss down by ranking position. Position one loses most, which is logical: the overview sits where the top result used to be.
xychart-beta
title "Click-through rate impact when an AI Overview appears (Ahrefs, Dec 2025)"
x-axis ["Pos 1", "Pos 2", "Pos 3", "Pos 4", "Pos 5", "Pos 6", "Pos 7", "Pos 8", "Pos 9", "Pos 10"]
y-axis "CTR change (%)" -70 --> 0
bar [-58.0, -50.8, -46.4, -38.8, -32.6, -30.5, -29.7, -28.8, -29.7, -19.4]
Seer Interactive looked at 53 brands and 5.47 million queries from January 2025 to February 2026. Organic click-through on queries with an overview fell from 3.19% to 2.36%, a 26% drop, while queries without one rose from 2.75% to 3.82%. The one bright spot: on informational queries, a brand cited inside the overview earned 2.07% click-through against 0.94% when not cited.
Google's own position, from Liz Reid in August 2025, is that "total organic click volume from Google Search to websites has been relatively stable year-over-year". Both things can be true. Google counts all clicks across more searches; the studies count clicks per search on the queries where an overview appears. If your queries are in the second group, the national total does not help you.
Which query types trigger an AI Overview
Informational queries trigger them, and almost nothing else does at scale. Ahrefs found that 99.2% of keywords with an AI Overview were informational, with commercial keywords at 5.8% and transactional at 4.0% (keywords can carry more than one intent). The median AI Overview keyword was four words long with 500 searches a month, against two words and 29,000 for keywords without one.
Semrush's 200,000-keyword study found the same shape: 80% of desktop AI Overview keywords were informational, transactional under 3%, navigational under 2%. And 82% of the overviews on desktop appeared on keywords with fewer than 1,000 searches a month. Long-tail, question-shaped, low volume: the exact queries a small business blog was built to catch.
Pew's data adds the length effect. Searches of one or two words got a summary 8% of the time; searches of ten words or more got one 53% of the time, and searches starting with who, what, when or why got one 60% of the time.
The commercial picture is moving. Semrush's July 2026 follow-up on 600,000 US keywords found commercial-intent results with an AI Overview grew 71% between November 2025 and April 2026, while transactional results fell 5%. Hannah Pedri, Semrush's head of paid search, put it plainly: "Many of the keywords with the highest CPCs are also the keywords increasingly triggering AI Overviews."
Seer's dataset points the same way. Among the query patterns in its 53-brand set, comparison queries ("X vs Y") triggered an overview 95.4% of the time, review queries 86.3%, "best of" queries 81.3%, and price or cost queries 83.4%. Even "near me" phrasing triggered one 76.9% of the time in that set, so do not assume a local query is safe just because it has a town name in it.
Query type against AI Overview likelihood, and what to do
| Query type | Example | AI Overview likelihood | What to do |
|---|---|---|---|
| Question or how-to | "how long does a kitchen fitting take" | High (60% of question-word searches in Pew; 85.9% in Seer's set) | Answer in the first 60 words of the page. Aim to be cited, and stop counting clicks as the goal |
| Long informational, 4+ words | "do I need planning permission for a garden office uk" | High (median AIO keyword is 4 words, 500 searches a month) | Keep the page if it feeds enquiries by phone or form. Cut or merge pages that only ever earned traffic |
| Comparison, review, "best" | "quartz vs granite worktops", "best accountant for contractors" | High and rising (95.4% comparison, 81.3% "best of" in Seer) | Put your real opinion and real prices on the page. Generic comparison content gets absorbed into the summary and nothing comes back |
| Price and cost | "boiler service cost northampton" | High (83.4% in Seer's set) | Publish actual prices. Overviews cite pages with numbers in them |
| Commercial, short | "kitchen fitters", "contractor accountant" | Low but rising (5.8% commercial in Ahrefs; commercial overviews up 71% in six months per Semrush) | Service pages still earn clicks. Keep them specific to what you sell and where |
| Local with place name | "physio kettering", "plumber near me" | Mixed (near-me 76.9% in Seer; local pack still shows above or alongside) | Google Business Profile, reviews and a location page matter more than the overview |
| Transactional | "buy ncr invoice books", "book mot online" | Very low (4.0% in Ahrefs, under 3% in Semrush, falling 5% in 2026) | Leave these alone. Spend the time on the rows above |
| Branded | "your company name reviews" | Very low (4.79% in Amsive's 700,000-keyword study, and click-through rose when one did appear) | Make sure the overview, when it appears, says what you want, and track branded search in Search Console each month |
The percentages come from US datasets. Ofcom's 30% figure is the only published UK-wide number, and nobody has published a UK breakdown by intent. Trethe table as a ranking of likelihood, not a forecast for your site, and then check your own queries.
How to find which of your queries show an AI Overview
There are four ways, and a small business should use at least two, because none of them gives the whole picture on its own.
Search Console's generative AI report. Google launched it in June 2026 and rolled it out to all sites by 31 August 2026. It shows impressions, pages, countries, devices and dates for AI Overviews and AI Mode. It does not show queries, and it does not show clicks. So it answers "do my pages appear in overviews at all, and which pages", not "which search terms".
The standard Performance report, filtered by query. Google's help page confirms a click on a link inside an AI Overview counts as a normal click, and the overview "occupies a single position". Take your top 30 non-brand queries and compare click-through rate for the same month in 2024 and 2026 at the same average position. The ones that have halved are your suspects.
A manual check. Open a private browser window, set location to your town, and run each of those 30 queries on mobile and desktop. Record three things per query: overview yes or no, your site cited yes or no, and which competitors are cited. It takes an hour. Repeat it quarterly, because the overviews are regenerated and the cited sources move.
A rank tracker with a SERP feature filter. In Ahrefs, the Organic keywords report has an AI Overview option under SERP features, with a "where target ranks" toggle to see which overviews cite you or a competitor. Semrush has a similar filter. Both are paid subscriptions, which only make sense with a few hundred queries to watch.
The spreadsheet from step 3 is the one that drives decisions. The tools tell you the scale; the manual check tells you what the overview actually says about you.
What a UK SME should change
First, stop treating informational traffic as the measure of success, because those clicks are not coming back; it is the same disconnect behind SEO that looks like it is working while enquiries stay flat. Seer's cited-versus-not-cited numbers show where the remaining clicks go: a brand named inside the overview earned more than double the click-through of one that was not. The goal for a how-to page is now citation first, click second, which is exactly what Google's own May 2026 generative AI guidance pushes towards.
That changes how a page is written. The first paragraph answers the question in plain terms with a number in it. The rest of the page carries what a summary cannot: the price, the exception, the thing that went wrong on a real job. Most of our AI Overviews optimisation work is rewriting the openings of pages that already rank so the overview quotes them.
Second, protect the pages that still earn clicks. Ahrefs and Semrush both found transactional queries almost never trigger an overview, and Seer found click-through on queries without one actually rose. Service pages, product pages and location pages are where the clicks live now. Make each one specific: the service, the town, the price range, the turnaround.
Third, for a business with premises, the map pack still does the work. A "physio kettering" search may show an overview, a local pack, or both, and the phone calls come from the pack. Reviews, categories and an accurate Google Business Profile are local SEO basics that an overview cannot replace.
Fourth, watch comparison and cost queries. They were commercial territory that Google is now summarising, and they are exactly the queries a buyer runs an hour before ringing you. A page with your real prices and a real opinion on quartz versus granite is harder to absorb than a generic one, and more likely to be cited when it is.
Fifth, if you run Google Ads, look at the paid numbers separately. In Seer's data, paid click-through on queries with an overview rose from 14.64% to 16.21% over the period, while it fell on queries without one. Ads inside or beside an overview are a different auction, and the search terms report will show you whether yours are winning there.
One decision rule
Take each query on your list and ask two questions: does an overview appear, and does the query bring enquiries, or only visits. If no overview appears, carry on as before. If one appears and the query brought enquiries, rewrite the page to be cited. If one appears and the query only ever brought traffic, stop spending time on it.
That sorts 40 queries into three piles in an afternoon. The third pile is usually larger than people expect.
Where AI Overviews fit into what you should pay an agency for is set out in our guide to what a UK SEO agency should cost and deliver. It is one part of a broader SEO programme. If you would like us to run that check on your queries and tell you which pile each one falls in, get in touch about AI Overviews optimisation.