The short answer: yes, for specific types of content, measurably. The longer answer is that the impact varies enormously by content type, domain authority, and query category — and the data on the magnitude of that impact is worth understanding precisely rather than treating as a uniform crisis.
At StreamAlive, we're not immune to this. We publish informational content about interactive presentations and audience engagement tools. A meaningful portion of that content answers questions that AI Overviews now address on-page (which connects directly to the broader zero-click search trend and why CTR is dropping on stable rankings). The clicks don't materialize even when we rank #1. That's a real change in the economics of information- content SEO, and it's worth looking at with clear data rather than panic.
The Actual Numbers
The Digital Bloom's 2025 Organic Traffic Crisis report — one of the more rigorous datasets available on this topic — found that the median publisher lost 10% of their year-over-year traffic in H1 2025. News publishers averaged -7%; non-news content sites averaged -14%.
The high-profile losses (HubSpot -70-80%, Forbes -50%, Business Insider -40-48%) are real but represent extreme cases — sites that had built large audiences around information-heavy content that AI systems can now synthesize from multiple sources. The median loss of 10% is more representative of the broader market.
For context: 73% of B2B websites experienced significant traffic losses between 2024 and 2025. But "significant" is doing a lot of work there — what counts as significant varies by source and methodology.
The Mechanism: AI Overviews
The primary mechanism is straightforward. When an AI Overview appears above the organic results for a query, organic CTR drops. The question is by how much:
- Seer Interactive (September 2025): organic CTR fell from 1.76% to 0.61% when an AI Overview was present — a 61% reduction
- Ahrefs (updated 2025): 58% click reduction
- Only 1% of users click cited sources within AI Overviews
AI Overview prevalence grew from 6.49% of queries in January 2025 to 13.14% in June 2025. By Q4 2025, they appeared in nearly 50% of queries. The content types most affected are definitional, how-to, and research-oriented queries — exactly the content that informational SEO programs have historically been built around.
What's Actually Driving Your Traffic Drop
Before attributing a traffic drop to AI, it's worth ruling out other causes:
Algorithm Updates
Google ran four core updates in 2024 and multiple in 2025. The March 2024 Core Update alone ran for 45 days and was described by Google as the "largest in history." Sites that published low-quality or AI-generated content at scale were specifically targeted. Algorithm-driven losses look identical to AI Overview-driven losses in aggregate traffic data.
The GSC Impression Bug
From May 2025 through April 2026, GSC systematically over-counted impressions. Since CTR is calculated as clicks ÷ impressions, and impressions were inflated while clicks were not, CTR figures during this period appear lower than they actually were. Traffic analysis comparing 2024 to 2025 using CTR as a metric is unreliable for dates in this range.
Competitive Displacement
In many categories, AI hasn't taken clicks — competitors have. Niche sites with higher quality content on specific topics have consolidated ranking positions previously spread across multiple less-focused sites.
The Zero-Click Reality
Independent of AI Overviews: zero-click search behavior has been growing. Similarweb's data shows zero-click share grew from 56% to 69% of all Google searches between May 2024 and May 2025. US organic click rate fell from 44.2% to 40.3% of searches in the same period.
Zero-click growth predates AI Overviews — featured snippets, Knowledge Panels, and other on-SERP answers have been reducing click-through rates for years. AI Overviews accelerated an existing trend rather than creating a new one.
What Actually Has Traffic Upside
The counterpoint to the traffic decline story is important: total Google search volume is still growing. Daily searches are estimated at 9.1-13.6 billion in 2025, up from 8.5 billion in 2024. More searches happen; fewer clicks result from each search. This means the queries with commercial intent — where users actually need to visit a site to complete a purchase or sign up — retain more click value per impression than informational queries.
Content types with relatively lower AI Overview exposure:
- Commercial and transactional queries (product pages, pricing pages, comparison pages)
- Queries requiring current data, personalization, or local context
- Queries for long-form guides where the full answer requires significant engagement
- Queries where the user wants a specific company's perspective or product (branded non-navigational queries)
What to Actually Measure
If you want to know whether AI is specifically hurting your traffic, the cleanest measurement is to:
- Filter GSC data to your top 50 highest-impression keywords
- Manually search each one to identify which have AI Overviews present
- Compare click trends for queries with AI Overviews versus those without, holding position constant
If clicks are declining significantly faster on AI Overview queries than on non-AI-Overview queries at the same position, you have evidence of AI impact specific to your site. If the decline is uniform across both groups, something else is driving it — and that something is worth investigating separately.