Google AI Mode and AI Overviews: Why Your Website Is Getting Fewer Clicks and What Still Drives Traffic

“Our impressions in Search Console are going up, but clicks have been dropping for months. Are we doing something wrong?” We heard this question three times in a single week this summer. And no, those three companies didn’t do anything wrong. They’re experiencing what many websites in Germany are currently experiencing: Google answers about one-fifth of the questions itself, right on the results page. If you don’t understand this, you’ll spend months optimizing in the wrong place.

In this post, we’ll break down what’s been happening in German Google Search since March 2025, how significant the drop in clicks really is based on measurements, how you can spot it in your Search Console, and what kinds of visibility still drive traffic. We’ll use numbers, not gut feelings.

What Has Changed in Google Search Since 2025

Two new features have been introduced, and they are often confused. The “AI Overview,” known internationally as “AI Overviews,” is the AI section at the top of the regular results page. It has been available in Germany since March 26, 2025, initially only for registered users aged 18 and older. “AI Mode,” on the other hand, is a separate tab next to “All” and “Images” where you can ask questions and seek information just like in a chat. It has been available in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland since October 8, 2025.

Since then, Google has merged the two. Starting in January 2026, queries from an AI overview on a smartphone are routed directly to AI Mode, and at the I/O developer conference in May 2026, Google referred only to “seamless AI search.” According to Google, AI Mode now has over one billion monthly users, and the number of queries there doubles every quarter. It’s important to note that AI Mode is not the default setting. When you type something into Google, you’ll still land on the classic results page—just often with an AI section at the top.

From the launch of the AI Overview to the new Search Console report: the most important data at a glance.

How many search queries in Germany are affected

The most reliable figure for Germany comes from Sistrix, the Bonn-based SEO tool, which analyzed approximately 100 million German search terms in February 2026. The result: For about 20 percent of search terms, Google displays an AI summary, and this percentage has remained stable since May 2025. For long-tail searches—that is, longer and more specific queries—the figure is around 30 percent. In 78.6 percent of cases, the overview appears above all organic results.

This is consistent with the findings of the Pew Research Center from July 2025 for the U.S.: For short searches consisting of one or two words, an AI-generated summary appears in only 8 percent of cases, while for queries with ten or more words, it appears in 53 percent of cases. The more a search query sounds like a real question, the more likely Google is to provide the answer itself.

How Much Are Clicks Really Declining?

It's worth taking a look at several independent measurements here, because they are surprisingly consistent in their order of magnitude.

Sistrix, Germany, February 2026: When an AI summary appears, the click-through rate for the first organic result drops from 27 percent to 11 percent. The rankings below it lose 25 to 30 percent. Only 33 percent of searches with an AI summary result in a click at all; for all searches, the average is 57 percent. Extrapolated, German websites lose around 265 million organic clicks per month—that’s 6.6 percent of all clicks for the search terms analyzed.

Ahrefs, February 2026: Across more than 300,000 search terms, the click-through rate for the No. 1 position was 7.3 percent in December 2023 and 1.6 percent in December 2025. In a position-by-position analysis, the top position in searches using AI overview loses 58 percent, the second position loses just under 51 percent, and the tenth position still loses 19 percent.

The higher a page ranks, the more it loses when Google answers the query itself.

Seer Interactive, November 2025, 42 client accounts: For information-oriented search queries with an AI summary, the organic click-through rate has fallen from 1.76 to 0.61 percent since mid-2024—a 61 percent drop. Paid ads saw an even steeper decline of 68 percent. Notably, even queries without an AI summary saw a 41 percent drop. Our take: Some of the research now takes place beforehand, in ChatGPT, Perplexity, or on social media.

Pew Research, U.S., July 2025: When Google displays an AI summary, users click on a traditional search result in only 8 percent of visits; otherwise, they do so in 15 percent of visits. Just 1 percent click on a link within the summary.

Google itself disputes this interpretation. Liz Reid, head of Google Search, wrote in August 2025 that organic clicks were “relatively stable” and that the quality of clicks was improving because users were less likely to bounce immediately. So far, Google has not backed this up with any verifiable click-through rate figures, only by referring to “billions of clicks per week” from AI features. We therefore rely on the measurements.

Who it affects and who it barely affects

The average of 6.6 percent masks just how unevenly the decline is distributed. The Sistrix data reveals a clear pattern: health portals are losing 24 percent of their clicks, specialized medical sites up to 30 percent, family, home, and garden advice sites over 20 percent, and news sites a good 7 percent. The biggest loser in absolute terms is Wikipedia, with 31.6 million fewer clicks per month, followed by DocCheck, AOK, ADAC, and Pons.

On the other hand, there are online stores, booking portals, and price comparison sites: Amazon is down 1.7 percent, Booking 0.5 percent, and weather and comparison sites less than 1 percent. Sistrix sums it up in one sentence: The more specific the questions a site answers, the more likely Google is to provide the answer itself now. Those who sell, broker, or book services are significantly less affected than those who provide explanations.

The loss of clicks is unevenly distributed: advice sites and health portals are losing traffic, while online stores and booking sites are barely affected.

For corporate websites, this means specifically: The how-to page “How much will a solar power system cost in 2026?” is losing clicks, while the service page “Solar Power in Cologne, Quote in 48 Hours” is losing hardly any. A study by Amsive covering 700,000 search terms adds a second point: For searches containing your brand name, the click-through rate rose by nearly 19 percent despite the AI overview, while for all other searches, it fell by 20 percent. Only just under 5 percent of brand searches trigger an AI overview at all.

How to recognize this effect in your Search Console

The typical pattern for an AI summary looks like this: Impressions remain the same or even increase, clicks decrease, and the click-through rate drops. This is due to the way Google counts. An AI summary occupies a single position in Search Console, and all pages linked within it are attributed to that position, even if they only appear as small source tiles. So your page continues to “rank” at number 2, accumulating impressions, but is clicked on less frequently.

The typical pattern in an AI overview in Search Console: Impressions remain steady, while clicks decline.

Since June 2025, Google has also been including clicks and impressions from AI mode in the standard performance report under "Web," without a separate filter. Each query in AI mode counts as a new search query, which further inflates the impression count.

As of August 31, 2026, a new report titled “Performance in Generative AI” is available worldwide. It shows which of your pages have appeared in AI overviews and in AI mode, broken down by page, country, date, and device. What it doesn’t show: clicks, search queries, click-through rate, or position. Websites with few AI impressions won’t see the report at all. So it’s useful for determining whether you appear in AI responses at all, but not for quantifying the traffic generated from them.

Our approach with clients: Set the performance report to a 16-month period, sort by search queries, and compare impressions and clicks for the top ten queries. Where impressions remain steady but clicks drop off, we examine the search results ourselves: Is there an AI overview there, and are we cited in it? Usually, there are only a handful of pages, and those are exactly the ones that matter.

Being cited is not the same as ranking

Until mid-2025, about three-quarters of the citations in AI summaries came from the top 10. That’s no longer the case. In March 2026, Ahrefs analyzed over 863,000 results pages: Only 37.9 percent of the cited sources now come from the top 10, down from about 76 percent in July 2025. Just under a third come from positions 11 through 100, and another just under a third from pages beyond position 100.

The reason is the technology behind it, which Google calls “query fan-out”: A question is broken down into several sub-questions, and for each one, Google searches for its own sources and compiles the answer from them. Whoever answers the sub-questions is cited, regardless of whether they rank 3rd or 40th for the main question.

And being cited pays off in measurable ways. Seer Interactive conducted a comparison: Pages that appear as sources in the AI overview have a 35 percent higher organic click-through rate than pages that appear next to them but aren’t cited. It’s no substitute for the old click counts, but it’s the difference between being visible and invisible.

What Google Itself Recommends for AI Search

In July 2026, Google updated its official guidelines for optimizing for AI features, and they are refreshingly unspectacular. The guidelines state, verbatim, that you don’t need any new machine-readable files, no “AI text files,” no special markup, and no Markdown. Anyone trying to sell you an llms.txt file is selling you something that, according to Google itself, isn’t needed.

Instead, the guide lists three things: content that isn’t a “commodity”—that is, content that isn’t interchangeable with what twenty other sites are writing. A clean technical structure that Google can read in its entirety. And up-to-date, complete information about the local business and its products. This isn’t a new discipline; it’s SEO, just with higher standards for the content.

What's Actually Generating Inquiries Right Now

Based on the data and our projects over the past twelve months, we have identified five levers that we will address in this order.

1. Service pages come before how-to pages. Transactional and local searches lose hardly any clicks, while generic informational pages lose the most. Check whether your service pages answer the questions a prospective customer might ask: price or price range, process, duration, region, and references. A service page that simply says, “We are your partner for,” will neither be cited nor clicked on.

2. Firsthand information instead of a summary. An AI will summarize whatever it can from five other pages. What it can’t summarize: your prices, your project photos, your specific process, and your experience from 200 construction sites. That’s exactly what Google calls “non-commodity content,” and that’s exactly what drives clicks, because the summary remains incomplete.

3. Answer sub-questions on a single page. Because Google breaks down questions, the page that answers not only the main question but also the sub-questions—such as “How much does it cost?”, “How long does it take?”, “What do I need?”, and “What happens next?”—comes out on top. Use clear subheadings, short, direct answers under each heading, and then go into more detail.

4. Brand visibility outside your own website. Ahrefs analyzed 75,000 brands and measured their correlation with AI visibility. Mentions of the brand name on other websites show the strongest correlation at 0.66, while backlinks correlate only at 0.22. Trade media, industry directories, associations, customer testimonials on review sites, and short YouTube videos all contribute to this. YouTube is now the most frequently cited domain in AI overviews.

5. Maintain your Google Business Profile. According to BrightLocal, the map box featuring three businesses remains visible in over 90 percent of local search queries, and the same analysis shows that the business profile is one of the most important sources for Google’s AI when it comes to local queries. Services, hours of operation, photos, reviews, and responses must be complete and consistent with the website. For detailed instructions on how to do this, see our article on Google Business Profiles for trades businesses.

What You Can Do Without

Three things we regularly encounter in proposals from other agencies—and which, as things stand today, serve no purpose: an llms.txt file, special “AI markup” beyond standard structured data, and chopping up text into short “AI bites.” Regarding files and markup, Google explicitly states that they aren’t necessary, and there’s no evidence to support the practice of chopping up text. Nor does it help to make the how-to page even longer in the hope of outranking the summary. The summary almost always wins out for generic queries.

How to Measure Success When Clicks Are No Longer the Whole Story

If part of your visibility comes from AI responses that nobody clicks on, you need different metrics. We look at three metrics for our clients: first, inquiries and calls per month, not sessions. Second, brand searches in Search Console, because they show whether people are specifically searching for you after seeing an AI response. Third, the citation list in the new AI report—that is, whether and on which pages you appear in overviews and in AI mode. If you only monitor the visitor traffic curve, you’ll see a decline and overlook the fact that inquiries may remain stable.

Conclusion: Fewer clicks, but not fewer customers, if the site does what it's supposed to do

The loss of clicks due to AI summaries is real and has been measured: about 20 percent of German searches, 265 million fewer clicks per month, and up to 60 percent fewer clicks on the No. 1 result. However, it primarily affects sites that answer general questions. Those who sell, make reservations, or work locally—and clearly demonstrate this on their websites—lose little and may even gain ground in AI-generated answers. The focus is shifting from “more text for Google” to “more substance for people,” and that’s good news.

Related topics: Local SEO—the key to regional visibility , and SEO basics that are most often overlooked when building a website · Service: SEO at a fixed price

Do you want to know where your website ranks in the AI responses?

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