Here is a number that should stop any website owner cold: in 2026, somewhere between 58% and 68% of Google searches end without a single click to any website. Google answers the question itself, with an AI Overview or an AI Mode summary, and the user never leaves. In AI Mode specifically, the figure is a brutal 93%. The old deal, where you wrote a good page and Google sent you visitors, is being rewritten, and not in your favour.
What is actually happening
AI Overviews now appear on more than a fifth of all searches, and when one shows up, click-through rates to the pages below it fall by nearly 60%. Google harvests your content, summarises it at the top, and answers the searcher directly, so the traffic you would have earned evaporates into a tidy grey box. This is the mechanism gutting the traffic of blogs, publishers and small businesses everywhere, and if your growth plan assumes Google clicks behave like they did in 2022, that plan is already out of date.
One important nuance, because doom is not the whole story: total search volume is actually growing, with impressions up nearly 50% year on year. People are searching more, they are just clicking less. So the pie is bigger, but Google is eating most of the new slices itself.
What still works
The winning move has flipped from “rank and collect clicks” to “become the source the AI trusts enough to cite.” Concretely: earn genuine authority and trust, publish things that are worth quoting rather than thin keyword pages, and structure content so an AI can lift a clear, attributed answer from it. Being the cited source in an AI Overview keeps your brand in front of people even when they do not click, and increasingly that citation is the prize. Chasing raw rankings for their own sake is fighting the last war. Optimise to be quoted, not just ranked, because more and more, quoted is all you get.
Related: our AI SEO coverage.