A client asked me the blunt version of this last month. Her organic traffic was down, her rankings weren't, and she'd read a dozen conflicting headlines. Half said AI Overviews were an extinction event for websites. The other half quoted Google saying everything was fine. She wanted to know which one was true, and what she was supposed to actually do about it.
It's the right question, and the honest answer is that both camps are shading it. The data does show AI Overviews depress clicks, clearly enough that pretending otherwise would be dishonest. But the "websites are dead" version oversells it, and Google's "nothing to see here" version leaves out the part where it hasn't shown its work. So let me walk through what the numbers actually say, where they disagree, what Google's own position is, and the specific moves that hold up once you strip out the panic and the spin.
Do AI Overviews actually reduce clicks?
Yes. On the whole, the strongest independent research says AI Overviews reduce clicks to websites, and the cleanest evidence comes from a source with no product to sell. In July 2025, the Pew Research Center studied the real browsing behavior of 900 U.S. adults across nearly 69,000 Google searches. On result pages that contained an AI summary, people clicked a traditional search-result link 8% of the time. On pages without one, they clicked 15% of the time, close to twice as often. And the AI summary didn't hand that click to itself instead: users clicked a link inside the summary just 1% of the time.
Two things make Pew the behavioral anchor here. It measures what people did, not what they said they did, drawn from actual clickstream data rather than a survey. And Pew doesn't sell SEO software, so there's no commercial reason to lean the finding one way or the other. When a neutral, behavioral study finds the click rate roughly halving in the presence of an AI summary, that's strong evidence of what people do when a summary is there. What an observational study can't do on its own is prove the summary caused the drop.
Pew also found the effect doesn't stop at the click. People ended their browsing session entirely 26% of the time after landing on a page with an AI summary, versus 16% without one. The summary doesn't just redirect the click. Sometimes it ends the search.
A 2026 field experiment tested the cause directly. Saharsh Agarwal and Ananya Sen randomly split 1,065 U.S. Google users into groups, one searching as usual and one using a Chrome extension that hid AI Overviews, and tracked two weeks of searching per person between January 7 and February 10, 2026. On searches where an AI Overview appeared, organic clicks to websites fell 39.8%, and zero-click searches, the ones that ended without a click to any website, rose 34.5%. It's a working paper that hasn't been peer reviewed, so treat it as one strong study rather than the final word. Even so, it's the closest thing to a lab result this field has, and it points the same direction Pew does.
How much are clicks really dropping?
Here's where you have to hold several numbers at once, because they measure different things and they don't perfectly agree. The click-through hit is real, but its size depends on what exactly you're counting. This table lays the major 2025 and 2026 studies side by side so you can see the shape of it rather than clinging to one scary figure.
| Source (date) | What it measured | Finding |
|---|---|---|
| Pew Research (Jul 2025) | On-page click rate, all results | 8% clicked a result when an AI summary was present, vs 15% without |
| Agarwal & Sen, SSRN working paper (rev. Jul 2026) | Outbound organic clicks, randomized experiment | 39.8% fewer organic clicks when an AI Overview appeared |
| Ahrefs (Apr 2025) | Position-1 click-through rate | 34.5% lower CTR for the top result when an AI Overview appears; an update put it near 58% by December 2025 |
| Similarweb (2025) | News-search zero-click share | Rose from 56% (May 2024) to 69% (May 2025); news organic traffic down about 26% |
| SparkToro / Similarweb (Jun 2026) | Whole-session zero-click share | 68.01% of U.S. Google searches ended without a click, up from 60.45% in 2024 |
| Semrush (Dec 2025) | Same-keyword zero-click, before vs after | Zero-click slightly decreased, from 33.75% to 31.53% (the honest outlier) |
The Ahrefs study of 300,000 keywords is the one people quote for the magnitude. In April 2025 it found the presence of an AI Overview correlated with a 34.5% lower click-through rate for the number-one result. An updated run on December 2025 data put that closer to 58%. Worth saying plainly: these are correlational studies from a company that sells SEO tools, comparing the same keywords across time rather than running a controlled experiment. That doesn't make them wrong. It means you read the direction and the scale as strong signal, not as a lab result. One controlled experiment now exists, the working paper above, and its 39.8% drop sits inside the range Pew and Ahrefs report. The two measure different things, so it doesn't confirm the Ahrefs number. It does point the same way.
Zoom out from any single result to the whole search page and the trend holds. SparkToro's analysis of Similarweb clickstream data found that in the first four months of 2026, 68.01% of U.S. Google searches ended without a click to any website, up from 60.45% in 2024. By that data, only about 276 of every 1,000 searches now send a click to the open web. One honest caveat: zero-click is driven by many things, including featured snippets, direct answers, and Google's own properties, not AI Overviews alone. So it's the best number for the broad "Google keeps more clicks" story, and the wrong number to pin entirely on AI.
The pain concentrates where you'd expect. Similarweb's publisher research found news-related searches ending without a click rose from 56% in May 2024 to 69% in May 2025, with organic search traffic to news sites down roughly 26% over that year. Informational queries are the most exposed, because a definition or a quick fact can be fully answered in the summary. That's the pattern worth internalizing, and I'll come back to it, because it's the difference between which of your pages are at risk and which aren't.
The honest counter-evidence
I'd be selling you a tidier story than the data supports if I stopped there. Semrush's AI Overviews study, published December 2025, ran a same-keyword before-and-after comparison and found zero-click behavior slightly decreased, from 33.75% to 31.53%, when an AI Overview appeared. That cuts against Pew and Ahrefs. It's one study with its own method, and it doesn't overturn the weight of the evidence. There's now one causal estimate, the 39.8% from the field experiment, and it has limits worth naming. It's a single study and a working paper. Its participants agreed to install a browser extension, and it covered two weeks of desktop searching per person in the U.S. in early 2026. Semrush is still the outlier, and one experiment doesn't settle the number. Anyone giving you a single confident percentage for "how much AI Overviews cost you" is rounding off that uncertainty. The aggregate trend is clear. The precise attribution is not.
Same study, useful context on how often you're even exposed to this: Semrush found AI Overviews appeared in 6.49% of searches in January 2025, spiked to 24.61% in July, and settled to 15.69% by November. Prevalence swings hard by tracker and by month, so treat any single figure as a snapshot. The point is that AI Overviews show up on a real and growing slice of results, not all of them.
What does Google say about it?
Google disputes the whole framing, and its position deserves a fair hearing even though I don't fully buy it. In an August 2025 post, Liz Reid, the head of Google Search, wrote that "total organic click volume from Google Search to websites has been relatively stable year-over-year," and that "average click quality has increased and we're actually sending slightly more quality clicks to websites than a year ago." Her argument is that AI Overviews get people searching more, and that the clicks that do come through are worth more because the person already got the lay of the land and clicked to go deeper.
That's a coherent story, and parts of it are probably true. The problem is what's missing. The post carries no charts, no percentages, no year-over-year figures to support "stable" or "higher quality." And "quality click" is Google's own term, defined on Google's terms. Meanwhile Pew, Ahrefs, and Similarweb have all put actual numbers on the table pointing the other way. So Google was asking you to take the reassuring half on faith while independent researchers had shown their work on the worrying half.
The field experiment is the first direct test of both of Reid's claims. On volume, organic clicks fell 39.8% on searches where an AI Overview appeared. On quality, the people who did click spent about the same time on the site, bounced at about the same rate, and went back to the results page about as often, whether or not they'd seen an AI Overview. In a follow-up survey, the group that saw AI Overviews didn't rate Google any higher on search quality or ease of finding information. The study didn't detect a change in clicks on ads, though the authors caution it had limited power to pick one up. Google's claims were tested, and on this evidence they didn't hold.
Google's argument is that someone who reads an AI summary and still clicks has self-selected, so the click that survives is a more decided visitor. It's a reasonable theory. The one controlled test didn't support it. Clicks from searches with an AI Overview bounced at the same rate, stayed on the site about as long, and went back to the results page about as often as clicks from searches where the overview was hidden. The researchers' own read is that AI Overviews "aren't necessarily sending 'higher-quality' clicks."
Referrals from AI assistants, where someone clicks a link inside a chat answer instead of a Google results page, are a separate question. I lean toward that traffic being more qualified, but the data is mixed. Adobe's August 2026 report found traffic it classifies as AI-referred converted at a 60% higher rate than non-AI traffic on U.S. retail sites in July 2026, though Adobe doesn't define what counts as AI traffic, and its own report says non-AI traffic out-converted it a year earlier. A peer-reviewed study in Marketing Science of 973 ecommerce sites, using data from August 2024 to July 2025, found ChatGPT referrals converted better than paid social and below most other channels. Your own conversion rates by channel are the answer that counts for your business.
So how worried should you actually be?
Less panicked than the doom headlines, more proactive than Google would like. The immediate revenue threat for most businesses isn't "an AI chatbot stole my customer." Direct referral traffic from AI answer engines is still a small share of visits, though the published numbers disagree on how small. Conductor's benchmarks, on U.S. data from May to September 2025, put AI referral traffic at 1.08% of total website traffic across ten industries. Contentsquare's 2026 benchmark, built on 99 billion sessions across 6,500 sites, put it at 0.2% of total visits for 2025. Both are probably undercounts, because a chunk of what AI search sends never gets labeled as AI traffic at all, which is the misattribution problem I get into further down this post. The wider question of how much traffic AI search actually sends, and why no published benchmark fits your site, has its own post. The bigger, nearer threat is the one hiding in the zero-click numbers: Google is answering more questions on its own results page and keeping the click.
Which means the real question isn't "how much traffic will I lose," it's "which of my pages are actually exposed." A page that ranks for a quick informational question, the kind a summary can fully absorb, is at genuine risk. A page built around commercial or comparison intent, where the searcher still has to reach a specific business to buy or book, holds up far better. The searcher who wants to hire someone can't complete that inside an AI summary. They still have to land somewhere.
This is also why "are we invisible to AI search" and "are we losing clicks to AI Overviews" are two sides of one coin. If you're not even eligible to appear in the answer, you lose both the citation and the click. Before you worry about the click-loss math, it's worth confirming you clear the basic gate at all, which I walk through step by step in whether your site is invisible to AI search. Absence is a bigger problem than a lower click rate, and it's more common than most businesses realize.
How do you actually measure AI Overview clicks?
You can measure them yourself, right now, without waiting for Google to add clicks to Search Console. When someone clicks a cited passage inside an AI Overview, the link often carries a text fragment that points at the exact sentence Google quoted. That fragment arrives in your landing URL as #:~:text=, and it can be captured in analytics as a custom dimension. It's already sitting in the data of any site getting cited, whether anyone's looking at it or not.
That's what Alex Galinos did, and in August 2026 he published the results in Search Engine Land. Across nine months, September 2025 through June 2026, he tracked 51,200 of these events on 1,661 cited snippets for a single brand. It's the first public dataset I know of that gets past "impressions only" and puts actual click numbers on AI Overview citations.
Read it as a case study, not as the kind of multi-study evidence the rest of this post rests on. One brand, one industry, one analyst. He names two limits himself, and both matter. The text fragment isn't unique to AI Overviews, because featured snippets and People Also Ask use it too, so the count is a ceiling on AI Overview clicks rather than a clean isolate. And the custom dimension is event-scoped while the organic totals it gets compared against are session-scoped, which makes the percentages directional.
With that framing, the volatility is the part worth your attention, because it backs up something this post already argues. Across the full window, AI Overview sessions were 7.53% of all organic sessions. In February and March 2026 they ran 16 to 17%. Recently they've run 2 to 4%. Same site, same content. Presence in an AI Overview isn't an asset you acquire and hold. It's a position that gets re-decided.
The snippet-level spread says something similar. The top single snippet drove 2,276 events. The average snippet drove 31. A handful of quoted passages carry nearly all of it, and which passages those are can move. He also logged what tended to get quoted: structured, specific content beat generic editorial, and HTML comparison tables outperformed.
One thing this isn't: a content fix. It's a measurement setup. What it gives you is a list of which of your passages are getting quoted, which is a different question from which of your pages are ranking, and a more useful one once AI answers are in the mix.
Is your AI traffic showing up as Direct?
Some of it probably is, and that means your organic numbers are lower than your organic performance.
In that same nine-month dataset, 11,468 of the 51,200 tracked events landed in Direct instead of Organic. That's 22.4% across the window. Month to month it swung from 16.8% in April 2026 to 29.3% in May 2026. One brand measured that, so it's a number to check against your own data, not a law of the web. But it's a big enough gap to change what a report says.
Think about what that does to a quarterly review. If roughly a fifth of the clicks AI search sends you get filed under Direct, then the organic numbers you use to judge whether SEO is working have undercounted all year. The channel that looks flat may not be flat. It may be leaking into a bucket nobody credits to search.
This adds a third case to the diagnostic further down this post. A drop with steady impressions and collapsing CTR is an AI-answer problem. A drop where impressions fell too is a rankings problem. Now there's a third: a drop in organic paired with a rise in Direct may not be a drop at all. It may be the same traffic, filed somewhere else.
Fair warning on the other side of it. Direct is a catch-all bucket. It absorbs bookmarks, dark social, email clients, app referrals, and untagged campaigns, and attribution loss into Direct is neither new nor caused only by AI. What's new is having a number attached to the AI portion of it, from someone who measured instead of estimating.
What should you do about AI Overviews?
Here's the part your client, and mine, actually want. The good news is that the most defensible playbook comes straight from Google's own documentation, not from a vendor selling an AI-optimization package. Google's guide to optimizing for generative AI features is blunt that appearing in AI Overviews takes no special markup or files, because the AI features run on core Search ranking and quality systems. It's still SEO. These six moves follow from that, in roughly the order I'd tackle them.
- Confirm you're eligible at all. Per Google's AI features documentation, a page must be indexed and eligible to show with a snippet to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode. That's the floor. If key pages aren't indexed or snippet-eligible, you're not in the running for the citation or the click. This is where a surprising number of "AI is killing us" problems actually start.
- Don't suppress your own snippets. It's tempting to think you can opt out of AI Overviews with
nosnippet,data-nosnippet, ormax-snippet:0. Google documents that those controls do keep you out of AI Overviews, but they also strip your normal search snippet, which usually lowers your click-through rate in regular results too. For most businesses that trades a small AI concern for a real organic-traffic cost. It's a kill switch, not a dial. - Shift weight toward intent a summary can't finish. Audit which of your pages target quick informational answers a summary can fully absorb, and which target commercial, local, or comparison intent that still needs your site. Lean your content investment toward the second kind. You don't abandon informational content, it still builds authority and can earn the citation, but you stop expecting it to carry the click on its own.
- Earn the citation inside the overview. If Google is going to answer the question on its own page, you want to be the source it names and links. That's the whole discipline of getting cited by AI, which I lay out in the guide to generative engine optimization. Being the cited source keeps your brand in front of the searcher even on a query that no longer sends a reliable click.
- Keep the citation once you have it. A citation you earn today can quietly disappear next month as the engine reaches for something fresher. That decay is its own problem with its own fixes, and I got into the data on it in why AI citations have a shelf life. Showing up once isn't the same as staying shown.
- Build to close the clicks that survive. With fewer clicks coming through, whoever does arrive should find the next step without hunting for it. The conversion side of that is its own post, on landing pages built to close instead of convince. Don't assume those clicks are worth more than they used to be, because the one controlled test found no difference in how they engaged. Compare conversion rates by channel in your own data to see what they're worth for your business. AI Overview clicks won't show up as their own channel, which is why the text-fragment tracking and the Direct misattribution covered above matter. Fewer clicks that convert beats more clicks that bounce.
On measurement, there's finally a real tool, with a real limit. Google announced a Generative AI performance report in Search Console in June 2026 that shows how many times your links appeared in AI Overviews and AI Mode. The catch: it reports impressions only, no clicks and no click-through rate. Google says it reached all websites worldwide on August 31, 2026, though its help page also says not every property has access yet. It proves you're showing up. It can't yet tell you what that visibility is worth in traffic. Measuring the real impact of AI Overviews still means combining a few imperfect signals rather than reading one clean number. But that limit is Google's reporting, not the whole picture. As the two sections above cover, the clicks are leaving a trace in your own analytics even when Search Console won't count them.
But are the blue links actually going away?
You've probably seen the version of this making the rounds: Google's AI Mode serves the answer directly. No blue links. No traffic. Get cited or get invisible. It's designed to scare you, and the scary part isn't entirely wrong. But "blue links are dying" is the wrong way to read it.
Here's the more accurate version: the blue link isn't disappearing, it's specializing. As AI Mode expanded to US searchers through 2026, Google got better at answering one specific type of query, the informational, top-of-funnel question, directly on the results page. Those clicks are the ones evaporating. Commercial, local, and branded searches still overwhelmingly send the click to a website, because those are the moments a searcher wants to do something, not just know something.
So the real question isn't "are clicks dying?" It's "which of my clicks are exposed, and am I the source the AI answer cites?"
What we're actually seeing in the data
We pulled 16 months of Search Console data for a publicly traded company we manage. The pattern is the clearest illustration of this shift we've seen:
- Impressions grew about 9%. Visibility didn't drop. The site is showing up more.
- Click-through rate fell from roughly 3.2% to under 1%. The decline started sharply in late 2025 and held. The clicks didn't scatter randomly; the informational queries lost them, while branded searches kept converting at a healthy rate.
- The site is now cited inside the AI Overview on multiple terms. That's the part the panic-posts leave out. On a meaningful share of its keywords, when Google generates an AI answer, this site is one of the sources named in it.
That last point is the whole game. The click moved into the answer, and being the cited source in that answer is the new version of ranking on page one. The durable version of that win is becoming the brand AI names for your core topics, not just getting picked up once.
What to do today to prepare
- Separate impressions from clicks and CTR. A drop with steady impressions and collapsing CTR is an AI-answer problem. A drop where impressions fell too is a rankings problem. They look identical on a traffic graph and need opposite fixes.
- Know your query mix. Informational queries are where AI Overviews bite. Commercial, local, and branded queries still route clicks to your page.
- On informational content, structure to be cited. Answer-first writing, clean structure, and the right schema make your content something an AI answer can lift and attribute.
- Build branded demand. Branded searches hold a click-through rate many times higher than non-branded ones. The most durable click is from someone already looking for you.
- Change your scoreboard. Impressions, branded search volume, AI citations, and assisted conversions now tell you whether you're visible, not clicks alone.
Applying this to a specific site is the work we do with clients. If you want to know which drop you have, that's the conversation.
Do AI Overviews reduce clicks? Yes. The independent, non-vendor data is consistent enough that arguing otherwise means ignoring it, even if the exact size is contested and Google disputes the framing without showing its numbers.
But the response isn't panic, and it isn't opting out. It's a shift in where the win lives. Be eligible to be cited, be the source Google names, aim more content at intent a summary can't finish, and build pages that close the clicks that still come through. The click got scarcer. Whether the one that survives is worth more is a question for your own conversion data, not an assumption to build on.
If you're staring at a traffic chart trying to work out how much of the dip is AI Overviews, how much is a ranking change, and what to actually do first, that's exactly the kind of untangling an engagement is built for. It's rarely one cause, and the fix is rarely one lever.
The click didn't disappear. It got scarcer. Stop mourning the volume and start earning the ones that still convert.
Frequently asked questions
The best independent data says yes. Pew Research Center found in July 2025 that on Google result pages with an AI summary, users clicked a traditional result link 8% of the time, versus 15% on pages without one, close to half as often. Only 1% clicked a link inside the summary itself. Ahrefs, studying 300,000 keywords, measured a 34.5% lower click-through rate for the top result when an AI Overview was present in April 2025, widening to about 58% by December 2025. A 2026 randomized field experiment, published as a working paper that hasn't been peer reviewed, found organic clicks fell 39.8% on searches where an AI Overview appeared. Google disputes the framing and says click quality is up, but it has published no data to support that.
It depends on what you measure. Ahrefs found the presence of an AI Overview correlated with a 34.5% lower click-through rate for the number-one result in April 2025, and an updated study put it near 58% by December 2025, both across 300,000 keywords. Pew's behavioral data showed the on-page click rate roughly halving, from 15% to 8%, when an AI summary appeared. Those studies are correlational and measure different things, so treat them as strong directional evidence rather than one precise figure. One randomized field experiment, a 2026 working paper that hasn't been peer reviewed, found organic clicks fell 39.8% on searches where an AI Overview appeared. Semrush is the honest outlier: its same-keyword before-and-after analysis found zero-click behavior slightly decreased.
No. In an August 2025 post, Liz Reid, the head of Google Search, wrote that total organic click volume from Google to websites has been relatively stable year over year and that AI is sending slightly more high-quality clicks than a year earlier. The catch is that Google published no charts or percentages to back those claims, and it defines a quality click on its own terms. Independent measurement from Pew, Ahrefs, and Similarweb points the other way. A 2026 randomized field experiment, published as a working paper, tested both claims. It found organic clicks fell 39.8% when an AI Overview appeared, with no measurable difference in how people engaged with the sites they clicked through to. The honest read is that Google disputes the click-loss story but has not shown the data, while outside researchers have.
Informational queries take the hardest hit, because a short definition or how-many-cups question can be fully answered inside the summary with no reason to click. Similarweb found news-related searches that ended without a click rose from 56% in May 2024 to 69% in May 2025. Higher-intent commercial and comparison queries hold up better, because the searcher still needs to reach a specific business to act. That split is the practical takeaway: audit which of your pages target answers a summary can fully absorb, and which target intent that still needs your site.
Start with Google's own guidance, which is the most defensible advice available: appearing in an AI Overview requires being indexed and eligible to show with a snippet, and Google says no special markup or files are needed because its AI features run on core Search ranking systems. Practically, that means keeping key pages indexed and snippet-eligible, not suppressing your snippets, aiming more content at intent a summary cannot fully answer, earning citations inside the overview itself, and building pages that convert the clicks that still come through. A 2026 field experiment found clicks from searches with an AI Overview engaged with sites about the same as other clicks, so check conversion rates by channel in your own data instead of assuming those clicks are worth more.
You can, but it usually backfires. Google documents that nosnippet, data-nosnippet, and max-snippet:0 controls will keep a page out of AI Overviews, and it now offers a Search generative AI control to opt out of grounding entirely. The problem is that suppressing your snippet also removes your normal search snippet, which typically lowers your click-through rate in regular results too. For most businesses that trades a small AI-visibility concern for a real organic-traffic cost. It is a deliberate kill switch, not a tuning knob, and rarely the right move.
No. Blue links are specializing, not disappearing. AI answers are absorbing clicks on informational, top-of-funnel queries, while commercial, local, and branded searches still send clicks to websites.
Not necessarily. In real Search Console data, we've seen impressions hold or grow while CTR falls on informational queries, with the same sites earning citations inside the AI answer. Whether it hurts depends on your query mix and whether you're the cited source.
Diagnose the actual cause first. Steady impressions with falling CTR points to AI answers; falling impressions points to rankings. Then structure informational content to be cited, build branded demand, and shift measurement to impressions, citations, and assisted conversions.
When someone clicks a cited passage in an AI Overview, the link usually carries a text fragment, the #:~:text= string that points at the exact sentence that got quoted. That fragment arrives in your landing URL and can be captured in analytics as a custom dimension, which gives you a first-party count of clicks Search Console doesn't report. One caveat: featured snippets and People Also Ask use the same fragment, so the number is a ceiling on AI Overview clicks rather than a clean isolate.
Some share of it gets misattributed before it reaches your reports. One brand that tracked AI Overview clicks for nine months, September 2025 through June 2026, found 11,468 of 51,200 events landing in Direct instead of Organic, an average of 22.4%, ranging from 16.8% to 29.3% month to month. That's a single case study rather than a general rule, and Direct is a catch-all that also absorbs bookmarks, email clients, and untagged campaigns. Still, it's a big enough gap to be worth checking your own data for, because if it's there, your organic reporting is undercounting itself.
Sources
- Pew Research Center: Google Users Are Less Likely to Click Links When an AI Summary Appears (July 22, 2025)
- Agarwal & Sen: The Impact of Google AI Overviews on Publisher Traffic and User Experience: Evidence from a Field Experiment (SSRN working paper, posted April 3, 2026, revised July 8, 2026) · not peer reviewed
- Ahrefs: AI Overviews Reduce Clicks by 34.5%, 300K keywords (April 17, 2025)
- Ahrefs: Update, AI Overviews Reduce Clicks by 58% (December 2025)
- Similarweb: The Impact of Generative AI on Publishers (2025)
- SparkToro / Similarweb: Less Than One Third of Google Searches Still Send a Click (June 2026)
- Semrush: AI Overviews Study, 10M+ keywords (December 15, 2025)
- Google (Liz Reid): AI in Search Is Driving More Queries and Higher Quality Clicks (August 6, 2025)
- Google Search Central: Optimizing for Generative AI Features
- Google Search Central: AI Features and Your Website
- Google Search Central: Generative AI Performance Reports in Search Console (June 2026)
- Conductor: 2026 AEO/GEO Benchmarks Report, 1,215 enterprise customer domains (published November 2025; U.S. traffic data May to September 2025)
- Contentsquare: 2026 Digital Experience Benchmark, AI-referred traffic, 99 billion sessions across 6,500 sites (April 2026; 2025 data)
- Search Engine Land (Alex Galinos): I Tracked 51,000 AI Overview Events, Here's What the Data Shows (August 18, 2026) · single-brand case study
- Adobe Digital Insights: AI Traffic Trends Report (August 2026, U.S. retail data through July 2026) · AI traffic not defined in the report
- Kaiser & Schulze: Frontiers: ChatGPT Referrals to E-Commerce Websites: How Do LLMs Compare Against Traditional Channels? (Marketing Science 45(4): 699-715, published online April 21, 2026, data August 2024 to July 2025)