What Google AI Overviews actually do to click-through

The Pew figures

Pew tracked the browsing of 900 U.S. adults in March 2025 and compared behavior on results pages with and without AI summaries. The click rate on traditional results was about 8 percent with a summary and about 15 percent without. Users who saw a summary were also more likely to end the session on that page. The study is a behavioral sample, not a site analytics export, which is what makes it useful: it measures people, not one site’s traffic.

How often summaries appear

Semrush measured the AI Overviews trigger rate at about 15.69 percent of queries in November 2025 within its study of roughly 69 million U.S. desktop sessions. The rate varies by query type; informational and question-form queries trigger summaries more often than navigational ones. A site’s exposure depends on how many of its queries are of the kind that trigger a summary.

What the summary rewards

Google documents that AI features draw on indexed pages and that the usual foundations apply: crawlable, indexable, helpful content with clear structure. In practice the pages cited are the ones that answer the query directly in a passage the summary can lift. A page that buries the answer under a preamble is indexed and not cited.

What to change

Measure Overview presence and citation per query alongside rankings. Rewrite the pages for the affected queries so that the answer sits in the first screen, the author is verifiable and the structured data states what the page is. Count qualified inquiries by source rather than sessions, because the citation produces inquiries that never show as a click. See AI Overviews versus AI Mode.