AI summaries have repriced a top ranking, so the same position now earns roughly half the clicks and your search KPI has to move with it.
A director walks into a review with rankings flat or improving and organic traffic falling, and cannot explain the disconnect to a CFO. The instinct is to blame the SEO program. The data says the program did its job and the asset it produces was repriced underneath it.
Your Rankings Are Fine. Your Clicks Are Not.
The incumbent way ties SEO value to position. Rank higher, earn more clicks, book more pipeline. That chain held while a ranking was the last thing between a searcher and an answer. It does not hold when an AI summary answers the question before the searcher reaches a single blue link.
Flat rankings with falling clicks is not a failure signal anymore. It is the expected output of a search page that answers first and links second.
8% vs 15%: The New Click Math
Pew Research tracked 900 U.S. adults across 68,879 unique Google searches during March 2025 and found users clicked a traditional result on just 8% of visits where an AI summary appeared, versus 15% without one, and clicked a link inside the summary only 1% of the time (Pew Research). The panel is 900 self-selected KnowledgePanel members, the data is March 2025, and it covers Google only by design, so treat it as a rigorous read on direction rather than a universal constant (Pew Research).
Pew also found that 26% of searches with an AI summary ended the browsing session, versus 16% without one (Pew Research). More answers end at the page. Fewer reach the site. Two behaviors are compounding at once: the searcher is less likely to click when a summary appears, and more likely to stop searching entirely. A ranking that used to sit one click from the visit now sits behind a summary that satisfies the question and closes the session before the site is ever seen.
Position One Just Got Repriced
Vendor data points the same way. Ahrefs studied 300,000 keywords, 150,000 with an AI Overview and 150,000 without, and reported the top-ranking page had a 34.5% lower average clickthrough rate when an AI Overview was present, comparing March 2024 to March 2025 Search Console data (Ahrefs). Ahrefs is vendor-reported and correlational, and cautions there is still no way to disambiguate AI Overview clicks and impressions from the rest of your Search Console data (Ahrefs).
Put the two together. This is not a "traffic is down" story. It is a repricing of the ranking asset itself. If position one is worth roughly half its former clicks, every SEO retainer priced purely on rankings is priced against an asset that lost value.
Stop Paying for Rank Alone
The ROI math changes with the asset. A ranking-first scope pays for a position that no longer delivers the clicks it once did. The correct KPI migrates to two things the old model ignored: whether your content is cited and included inside the answer, and the measured downstream influence of no-click impressions on branded and assisted search.
A director who keeps reporting average position is measuring the one number that decoupled from revenue. The chart still climbs while the pipeline flattens, and the deck says the program is working while the CFO sees the opposite in the numbers that matter. That mismatch is not a reporting glitch. It is the direct result of pricing a program against a metric the market repriced.
The Fork You Now Face
You have two ways to run search from here. Keep chasing position and paying for an asset that was repriced, then keep explaining the disconnect every quarter. Or re-baseline reporting toward inclusion inside the answer and downstream search lift, and renegotiate any scope priced on rankings alone.
That is not an SEO failure. That is an asset repricing.
Rankings without clicks are a trophy. Clicks without inclusion are a shrinking supply. Inclusion without downstream measurement is a claim you cannot defend upward.
Measure inclusion, not position. Treat flat rankings with falling clicks as expected, move the KPI to citation and assisted-search lift, and stop paying a rankings premium for clicks the summary now keeps.
The ranking still matters. It is just no longer the thing you are being paid for.
Work With Magnet
Magnet re-baselines search programs around answer inclusion and downstream search lift, then reprices scope to the KPI that still ties to revenue. See how Magnet runs search at https://www.magnet.co.
Sources
- Pew Research Center, Google users less likely to click when an AI summary appears (July 22, 2025): https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/07/22/google-users-are-less-likely-to-click-on-links-when-an-ai-summary-appears-in-the-results/
- Ahrefs, AI Overviews reduce clicks study: https://ahrefs.com/blog/ai-overviews-reduce-clicks/
- Magnet: https://www.magnet.co
