After hitting a low of 1.3% in December 2025, the click-through rate (CTR) on Google’s AI Overviews rebounded to 2.4% by February 2026. That’s an 85% increase in just two months, based on new data from Seer Interactive. What influences CTR? When an AI Overview appears, pages it cites receive more clicks than uncited pages on the same results page. However, both still see fewer clicks than results on queries without an AI Overview: No AI Overview: ~3.3% CTR AI Overview with citation: ~2.1% CTR AI Overview without citation: ~0.9% CTR How click patterns are shifting. Queries without AI Overviews are becoming more valuable. CTR on those searches rose from 2.8% in early 2025 to 3.8% by February 2026. A key factor: AI Overviews satisfy many quick-answer needs. Users who still click through are typically seeking deeper information. AI Overviews depend on query intent. Their presence varies widely by query type: Informational: ~36% show AIOs Transactional: ~5% Comparison: ~95% Question: ~86% However. A lower CTR doesn’t always signal worse performance. In some cases, clicks held steady while impressions increased. This indicates brands may have appeared in more AI Overviews even as CTR declined. Paid search remains much steadier. When Google displayed an AI Overview, paid CTR ticked up from 14.6% to 16.2%. When no AI Overview appeared, paid CTR dropped from 26% to 21.8%. Why it matters. Google’s AI Overviews aren’t just cutting overall clicks — they’re reallocating them, directing more traffic to cited sites and significantly less to those left out. That means you…