Google’s AI Overviews now appear across search results with varying frequency. However, in certain categories, they dominate entirely. According to Adthena:

  • Finance queries see AI Overviews on 79% of longer searches with five or more words. 
  • Retail shows 84% visibility for comparison and product discovery queries in the 9-10 word range. 
  • Healthcare also triggers high AI Overview penetration even when users are searching short medical questions of 1-3 words.

You know organic traffic faces headwinds. What you might underestimate is how severe the downstream impact on paid search can be. Here’s what that looks like in practice.

AI Overviews are systematically changing paid search, affecting everything from click volume to auction dynamics and conversion behavior. They are accelerating structural trends that are already reshaping search, including SERP saturation, automated bidding, Performance Max adoption, and broad match expansion. 

What makes AI Overviews significant is the speed of the rollout. In many verticals, Google had compressed what would have normally been a multi-year transition into mere months. Understanding the impact on your own paid search efforts requires examining how AI answers have reshaped each component of your campaign performance.

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AI Overviews drive lower response rates

So, how much have response rates been impacted by AI Overviews? Recent data from Seer Interactive reveals the scale of the decline. Paid CTR on queries featuring AI Overviews plummeted by 68%, dropping from 19.7% to 6.34% between June 2024 and September 2025.

At the same time, we saw organic CTR fall 61% on the same queries, but the steeper paid decline suggests AI Overviews reshape where paid ads appear and who clicks them, not simply their overall presence.

The trend accelerated sharply in July 2025 when paid CTR collapsed from approximately 11% to 3% in a single month. One month. This happened as Google expanded AI Overviews more aggressively into commercial and navigational queries, demonstrating AI Overviews’ direct impact on paid search response rates.

What we’re finding is that these declines are the most severe for non-branded informational queries. But it’s not all bad news. Branded search and high-intent transactional queries are showing greater resilience, with many advertisers seeing minimal impact on their core conversion-driving terms.

AI Overviews contribute to higher CPCs through inventory compression

We’re also finding a direct correlation between AI Overviews and the cost of paid search campaigns. That’s because the response rate decline is directly driving cost-per-click…


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Last Update: February 26, 2026