AI Overviews halve clicks on Google’s top result. They showed on 43 per cent of pages

The first organic result on Google took 20.02 per cent of clicks in July 2026. Where AI Overviews sat above it, the same position took 9.69 per cent. The figures come from the monthly organic click study published by Advanced Web Ranking, last updated on 14 September.

Position one drops from 20.02 to 9.69 per cent with an answer above

The gap runs down the page. Position two falls from 10.36 per cent to 3.69 per cent. Position three falls from 3.89 per cent to 1.7 per cent. In relative terms the top slot loses 52 per cent of its click rate when a generated answer appears first.

Advanced Web Ranking measured 43 per cent of desktop pages in July

The share of pages carrying an overview matters as much as the size of the drop. In July it was 43 per cent of the desktop pages in the sample. A site whose queries fall inside that 43 per cent is working with a different click rate from one whose queries do not, even at the same ranking.

Three in four searches with an overview end without a click

The study also counts searches that end with no click on any result. With an overview the rate is 74.3 per cent. Without one it is 53.6 per cent. Other measurements point the same way: AI Mode cut clicks to websites by 18.8 points in a field study. It is not the whole picture, though, because Le Monde reports no audience drop from AI Overviews.

The sample is 1.75 million American result pages a month

Advanced Web Ranking tracks the top 20 organic positions across roughly one million desktop and 750,000 mobile result pages each month. July position one alone covered 184.8 million impressions and 37.0 million clicks, of which 17.3 million impressions came from pages with an overview. The data is American, so a European site should treat the shape of the curve as the lesson, not the exact numbers. Search Console now reports AI Overviews everywhere, which is where a local reading has to come from.

Who gains and who loses is readable from the same table. Google keeps the visit inside its own page. The shops and comparison sites named inside an overview collect the mention without owing anyone a click. The losers are the sites whose whole plan rested on being first, because first now pays 9.69 per cent instead of 20.02 per cent.