Google’s AI Overviews are wrecking traditional search metrics, and marketers can’t figure out what’s happening anymore. Click-through rates have nosedived from 7.3% to 2.6%, while AI summaries now dominate 13% of searches—jumping to 40% for local businesses. Mobile users scroll 140% more just to find organic results. Performance tracking? Broken. Traffic data? Meaningless. Marketers watch helplessly as their dashboards implode and organic clicks vanish by 30% yearly. The full damage goes deeper than anyone expected.

The search landscape just got a whole lot messier. Google’s AI Overviews now appear in 13.14% of all queries, and marketers are scrambling to figure out what the hell is happening to their traffic. On desktop, that number jumps to 19%. For local business searches? A whopping 40.2%. Yeah, it’s that bad.

Google’s AI Overviews now hijack 40% of local business searches, leaving marketers watching their traffic evaporate.

The damage to organic click-through rates is brutal. The top organic result used to pull around 7.3% CTR. Now, with AI Overviews hogging the spotlight, it’s down to 2.6%. That’s a 34.5% nosedive. Some industries are seeing drops up to 37%.

The kicker? Most links Google’s AI cites don’t even come from the top 10 organic results. So much for ranking number one.

Mobile users have it worse. They’re scrolling through multiple screens just to find the initial organic link. The prime real estate that marketers fought tooth and nail for? Gone.

Replaced by AI-generated summaries that push organic results down by over 140% in vertical scroll distance. It’s like Google decided to build a skyscraper on top of everyone’s storefront.

The volatility is making measurement a nightmare. About 69% of queries show non-normal fluctuations with AI Overviews. One day they’re there, the next they’re not. Marketers can’t track performance when the goalposts keep moving.

Meanwhile, Google reports users are loving it—10% more engagement across major markets. Great for users. Terrible for anyone trying to drive traffic. By mid-2025, AI Overviews had reached over one billion users, cementing their dominance in search behavior.

Informational queries trigger AI Overviews 84% of the time. Problem-solving searches? Nearly 75%. These AI-powered snippets, previously known as Search Generative Experience, position themselves at the top of SERPs and are now mandatory for all search results.

Even commercial queries, where the real money lives, trigger them 17.2% of the time. The AI is moving down the funnel, eating into spaces where companies spend their ad budgets.

The real punch to the gut? Organic clicks are shrinking by 30% year-over-year according to some estimates. Users get their answers directly from AI Overviews and bounce. No clicks. No conversions. No data to analyze.

Google’s effectively rewriting the rules while everyone’s still playing.

And marketers? They’re left staring at broken dashboards, wondering where their traffic went.