3 SEO Metrics Impacted By AI Overviews And What To Check Instead

Victor Karpenko, Founder and CEO of SeoProfy, has 16+ years of experience building data-driven SEO strategies.

​For years, I could confidently use several key metrics to assess the SEO performance of a website: keyword rankings, impressions, click-through rates and organic traffic. A steady increase in these figures almost always predicted revenue growth.

Recently, however, I’ve noticed a shift. The metrics were rising and falling, but no real business results followed. As an SEO company owner, I couldn’t continue to rely on them for client reporting and analysis.

The reason behind all this was AI. Specifically, Google’s AI Overviews. They now appear for more than 20% of searches, and I see even higher figures in certain industries and markets. They have changed how search engine results pages look, how people use them and what they click. I’ve changed my SEO performance analysis accordingly.

Here are the metrics that I once trusted for client reporting and strategy development but that no longer reflect the full reality of organic visibility. I’ll explain why they’re less reliable than before and what I monitor instead.

1. Search Rankings

Many people still think that SEO is all about ranking higher, so I rank this metric as the most impacted here. When AI Overviews (AIOs) appear in search results, the AI summary box is the first thing users see, and it’s 1,200 pixels tall on average. This means the familiar list of blue links appears below the fold on most devices.

Now, even pages that take the No. 1 spot might not be seen at all, let alone clicked. The first link gets 58% fewer clicks when an AIO is present.

My analysis of more than 100 SEO projects shows that the impact is less critical for commercial, transactional and navigational queries. The AI Overview rate for such searches is often less than 10%.

Organic rankings also don’t correlate with potential AIO visibility (citations or mentions). Ahrefs found that almost two-thirds of URLs cited by AIOs ranked No. 11 and below.

2. Impressions And Click-Through Rates

Google Search Console counts your website’s appearances in organic search results and in AI Overviews as part of the overall impression data. However, 92% of searches that feature AIOs end without a click, and only 1% result in a visit from the AI summary box.

Users frequently find the AI-generated summary enough to answer their questions, so they don’t need to visit other websites, even if the AIO shows links to sources. This makes impressions practically useless, and since it’s part of the click-through rate calculation, this metric gets demoted, too.

I’ve seen clicks drop by 50% after the introduction of AIOs, even as impressions continued to rise. This led to lower CTRs and significant panic among business owners and marketers. I used to treat such trends as a sign that something was wrong with how pages appeared in search. With AIOs, this combination simply stopped indicating issues or improvements in website performance.

3. Total Organic Traffic

For many industry professionals, SEO is unimaginable without traffic measurement, and I agree. However, I’ve changed the way I approach this metric. Total organic traffic is falling for most websites. McKinsey predicts that AI search will put up to 50% of traffic at risk.

The aggregate hides what exactly is falling and what might still be holding up. For the sites I’ve worked with, blog sections have lost up to 87% of clicks since the introduction of AIO, while pages with interactive features or tools (such as calculators) have continued to grow, gaining up to 500% more visitors on average. Other sections that saw an increase in traffic include contact, CTA, product, service and local pages.

I still use total traffic as a diagnostic metric. For more actionable insights and useful reporting, I segment it by intent and pair it with conversions. Such an approach helps you see whether the overall drop is also affecting commercial traffic or if it’s just a result of AIOs stealing top-of-the-funnel searchers.

Conclusions

Here are some key takeaways on how I’ve adjusted SEO monitoring to account for the impact of AI Overviews:

• Monitor rankings and traffic from branded search and higher-intent transactional queries instead of keywords related to the research or consideration stages of the buyer journey.

• Segment your total organic traffic to focus on commercial interest and qualified visits.

• Track leads and conversions from organic search instead of general impressions and clicks.

These metrics are more important for analyzing brand visibility and creating revenue-driving strategies in 2026 than many legacy SEO metrics. I still use traditional SEO indicators when diagnosing issues, but the main shift is clear: Branded search and AI visibility now mean more for real business results.​

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