Google’s AI Overviews now answer a meaningful share of B2B searches directly on the results page, before a single link gets clicked. That’s changed both how much traffic ranking pages get and what kind of content still earns a click when an Overview is present. Here’s what’s actually shifting, and where the clicks are still going.
How Are AI Overviews Changing B2B Search?
AI Overviews summarize an answer directly in Google’s results, often using content pulled from several ranking pages, and place that summary above the traditional list of blue links. For a growing share of searches — particularly informational, definitional, and comparison queries — a searcher gets a complete-enough answer without clicking through to any source. Multiple independent studies have found meaningful click-through-rate declines on queries where an AI Overview appears, though the exact magnitude varies by study and industry, and none of the major published studies are B2B-specific.
What the Data Actually Shows
Several studies have measured this shift from different angles. Ahrefs’ research found organic click-through rates dropping by more than half on queries with an AI Overview present. Seer Interactive found a similar directional decline in their own data set. SparkToro’s research pointed to a meaningful drop in the share of searches that result in any click at all — sometimes referred to as the “zero-click” rate, with broader estimates putting the share of all Google searches that end without a click at roughly two-thirds. It’s worth being honest about the limits of this data: these are general-web studies, not B2B-specific research, and the actual impact on your industry, query set, and buyer behavior may differ meaningfully from the aggregate numbers. For the full breakdown of these studies, see How Much B2B Search Traffic AI Overviews Are Actually Taking in 2026.
Which Searches Still Get Clicks?
The decline isn’t uniform. Queries with high commercial or transactional intent — where the searcher clearly wants to evaluate a specific vendor, compare pricing, or take an action — tend to hold up better than purely informational queries, where an AI Overview’s summary is often genuinely sufficient on its own. This matters directly for B2B content strategy: a purely definitional post (“what is X”) is more likely to get summarized and skipped than a comparison or evaluation piece that a serious buyer needs to read in full to make a decision.
What This Means for B2B Content Strategy
The practical implication isn’t to stop publishing informational content — it’s to make sure informational content is written well enough to get cited inside the AI Overview itself, since being the cited source still carries some brand visibility even without a click, and to invest relatively more in the deeper, decision-stage content that buyers still need to click through and read in full. A thin, generic explainer is now competing against an AI’s own summary of the same topic and losing. A genuinely thorough comparison, backed by specifics a buyer needs before committing budget, still earns the click.
A Practical Reframe
It’s worth separating two different goals that used to be served by the same page: getting found (traffic) and getting trusted (brand visibility). AI Overviews are compressing the first goal for a lot of informational content while leaving the second mostly intact — being cited by name inside an AI Overview is still a visibility win, even without a click. The mistake would be measuring all content purely by click-through rate going forward and concluding that informational content isn’t working, when it may be doing real (if less measurable) work at the citation level. This is also part of a much broader shift in how B2B buyers move between AI tools and traditional search — see The B2B Buyer’s Search Journey: Google, AI Chat, or Both? for the full picture.
How to Adapt
Structure informational content to maximize citation likelihood — direct answers, clear structure, specific claims — even knowing some readers won’t click through. Weight investment toward deeper, comparison, and evaluation content where the click still matters most. And track your own Search Console impressions-versus-clicks ratio on key pages over time; a rising impression count with a falling click rate is a fairly direct signal that AI Overviews are increasingly summarizing your content on a given query.
Quick Answers
Are AI Overviews killing organic traffic? They’re reducing it meaningfully on informational queries, based on multiple independent studies, though the exact percentage varies and none of the major studies are B2B-specific.
Should B2B companies stop writing informational content? No — but it should be written to maximize AI citation value, since the click may not follow even when the citation does.
What content still reliably gets clicks? Comparison, evaluation, and decision-stage content that a serious buyer needs to read in full, rather than content an AI can fully summarize in a few sentences.
This piece is part of the SEO & AEO hub, covering how AI Overviews and generative search are reshaping B2B content strategy.