Greg K.SEO and analytics at Adcore · LinkedInAn AI Overview is a generated answer placed above the regular Google results, with links to its sources. In Ukraine, AI Overviews have been available in Ukrainian since 2025. You can’t turn them off, Google sets no special requirements for appearing in them, and according to most independent studies they take a good share of clicks. Below: other people’s research, our own figures and what to do about it.
What is an AI Overview
You ask Google a question, and above the results there’s already a ready-made answer a few paragraphs long, with links. Imagine a customer walking toward your store with a question, and a robot waiter meets them at the door and hands them a card with the answer. The customer nods contentedly and turns around. You watch it all through the window.
An overview appears on its own when the system decides it will be useful. You don’t have to turn it on. It relies on Google’s core ranking systems, and since January 2026 it has run on the Gemini 3 model. Alongside it there’s AI Mode: a separate tab for conversation, also available in Ukraine. Google also lets people jump from an overview into that conversation.
How do you turn off AI Overviews? You can’t. Google says so plainly: “Features cannot be turned off.” There is a workaround: the “Web” filter under the search bar shows only text links without overviews, but you have to choose it for every search.
Do AI Overviews reduce clicks
Independent studies say they do, while Google disagrees. Here are both sides:
| Who measured | What it showed | Based on |
|---|---|---|
| Pew Research | With an overview, people clicked a result in 8% of visits; without one, in 15%. A link inside the overview got clicked in 1% | 900 US adults, March 2025 |
| Ahrefs | First-position CTR is 58% lower with an overview | 300,000 queries, December 2025 |
| Seer Interactive | CTR with an overview fell from 1.76% to 0.61%; without one it’s also falling, but more slowly | 3,119 queries from 42 clients |
| Authoritas | Minus 47.5% on desktop and 37.7% on mobile | 3,500 queries, UK news |
The methods differ, so the figures can’t be compared side by side: what matters is the direction, not the exact percentage.
Google replies that “total organic click volume from Google Search to websites has been relatively stable year-over-year,” and that click quality has gone up. The company called the Pew study methodologically flawed. Google hasn’t, however, published any data of its own to check this. Interestingly, one study does support Google’s side: Semrush compared queries before and after overviews appeared and saw no rise in searches without clicks (33.75% versus 31.53%).
What our data shows for Ukraine
We couldn’t find Ukrainian data from anyone, so we gathered our own.
The data below covers Ukrainian search results. We took 81 non-brand queries for which 16 sites belonging to our clients and projects ranked in the top five over the 28 days to November 3, 2026, and checked the live results in Ukraine. An AI Overview appeared on 77 of them, or 95%. In Semrush’s global database at the end of 2025, about 16% of queries triggered one, although the samples are very different: ours includes only what people actually come to websites for.
Queries with an overview where our sites ranked first or second averaged a 2.1% CTR. For reference: Sistrix, back before overviews, put first position at 28.5% on mobile. But the more interesting question is where exactly the clicks disappear:
| Query | Position | Impressions | Clicks | CTR |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| вовча паща (cleft palate) | 1.9 | 8,912 | 7 | 0.08% |
| білий наліт на язиці (white coating on the tongue) | 1.9 | 788 | 2 | 0.25% |
| заяча губа (cleft lip) | 1.0 | 2,183 | 29 | 1.33% |
| елайнери ціна (aligners price) | 3.0 | 1,810 | 88 | 4.86% |
| uklon чи bolt що дешевше (Uklon or Bolt, which is cheaper) | 2.8 | 738 | 55 | 7.45% |
An AI Overview appears on all five queries. Clicks and impressions over 28 days from Search Console, all devices; live results captured once, on desktop. These are real Ukrainian-language queries, with translations in parentheses.
The picture is clear. Where an explanation is all people need, they read the overview and leave: first or second position brings almost no clicks. Where they’re choosing or comparing, clicks survive even under the overview, and at a lower position. This isn’t proof of causation: we have only four queries without an overview, so there’s almost nothing to compare against, and the sample is small. But the logic is easy to see, and we’ll need it below.
Who do AI Overviews cite
Fewer top-ranking pages than you’d think. In March 2026 Ahrefs showed that only 37.9% of the URLs cited in overviews rank in the top ten, while in summer 2025 it was about 76%. seoClarity, on 362,000 queries, got 32%: a different method, but the same conclusion. The top 10 is no longer a ticket into the overview.
So what is? Brand mentions across the web correlate with AI visibility more strongly than anything else: across 75,000 brands, Ahrefs found a coefficient of 0.66–0.71. That’s a correlation, but the logic is familiar from our article on E-E-A-T: what counts is what others say about you. In October 2026 Sistrix compared 96,000 pages: the cited ones more often have a table of contents at the top, at least five subheadings, tables, an author with a photo, a question in a subheading and a visible update date. The llms.txt file made no difference.
Is it worth getting cited? Seer calculated that cited brands get 35% more organic clicks than when they’re absent from the overview, although the authors warn that causation isn’t proven.
How to get into AI Overviews
Google’s official answer is short: the page must be indexed and eligible to be shown with a snippet. There are no separate technical requirements. The May 2026 guide says it outright: “optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO.” The same things work, only the competition is tougher.
- Answer in the first sentenceGive the direct answer to the query first, then the details. This matters for regular results too: our measurements are in the article on E-E-A-T.
- Add what others don’t haveGoogle calls it non-commodity content: your own measurements, photos, experience. AI easily rehashes common knowledge, but it doesn’t have your numbers.
- Work on mentionsReal reviews, publications, talks. According to Google, inauthentic mentions help less than you might think.
- Check bot accessA page without a snippet won’t make it into an overview, and AI services’ bots can’t see your site if they’re blocked. What exactly to unblock, we show in our article on llms.txt.
- MeasureSince 2026, Search Console has had a separate report on impressions in generative AI features, available to all sites. It has no clicks yet, only impressions.
What you don’t need to do, even though people charge for it
Google says outright that there’s no such requirement and that you don’t need to write specially for AI.
There’s no special markup or file for overviews. Regular markup only has to match the visible text.
A 2024 Princeton study showed a 30–40% visibility gain from quotes, statistics and sources. But that was a test setup on a language model, not Google, and we found no direct confirmation for overviews. Quotes and data are worth having for their own sake.
In the same study this technique did worse than the baseline.
What a business should do
Overviews handle simple “what is” queries well: people get a definition and leave. So the logic of content has to change.
- Don’t build your plan on definitions alone. An article about what something is should offer what the overview lacks: a calculator, an analysis, first-hand experience.
- Bet on queries where people make a decision. Price, comparison, choosing a provider. Overviews are showing up here too: in January 2025, 91% of overviews were on informational queries; by October it was 57%. But here people still need to visit a site.
- Count leads, not traffic. Clicks may drop, but if the most interested people stick around, leads won’t fall. Check this against your own data.
- Be especially accurate on health and money topics. Overviews make mistakes there too, and the requirements for these topics are higher. More in our article on YMYL.
Want to know what overviews are doing to your traffic? We’ll check your site’s queries, clicks and citations and tell you what’s worth changing. SEO audit from Adcore.
Frequently asked questions about AI Overviews
Why don’t I see an AI Overview?
It doesn’t show up for every query, only when the system decides it will be useful. Try a question rather than a site name: overviews appear less often on navigational queries.
Can I stop Google from citing my site in overviews?
Yes, with nosnippet, data-nosnippet or max-snippet, but these rules also apply to the regular snippet, so the page loses its description in the results. For most sites that’s a bad trade.
Can AI Overviews be trusted?
Check anything important against the sources. A study by Oumi, reported by The New York Times, found about 91% of answers accurate, but more than half of those weren’t fully supported by the sites they cited.
How is GEO different from SEO?
GEO means optimizing for AI answers. Google considers it part of SEO. In practice, you pay more attention to brand mentions and citations, while the foundation stays the same.
Where can I see impressions in AI Overviews?
In Search Console, in the generative AI report. The report shows impressions only, so you can’t isolate clicks from overviews.
Sources
Quotations from non-English sources are our translation. The click measurements are ours; clients’ Search Console data is shown without names.
- Optimizing your website for generative AI features, Google Search Central, 2026.
- AI features and your website, Google Search Central.
- AI Overviews in Google Search, Google Help.
- Search Generative AI performance reports, Google, June 2026.
- AI in Search is driving more queries and higher quality clicks, Google, August 2025.
- Google users are less likely to click on links, Pew Research Center, July 2025.
- AI Overviews Reduce Clicks by 58%, Ahrefs, February 2026.
- AIO impact on Google CTR, Seer Interactive, September 2025.
- Authoritas report, Press Gazette, July 2025.
- AI Overviews Study, Semrush, December 2025.
- AI Overview citations and top 10, Ahrefs, March 2026.
- AIO rankings overlap, seoClarity, October 2025.
- AI brand visibility correlations, Ahrefs, December 2025.
- Citation Worthiness, Sistrix, October 2026.
- GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, Aggarwal et al., KDD 2024.
- Why almost everything you knew about Google CTR is no longer valid, Sistrix, updated 2025.
- Study by Oumi and The New York Times, Search Engine Roundtable, April 2026.