One of the earliest conversations any SEO has with a client is about how to increase keyword rankings. This conversation starts with the hope that ranking in the topmost positions will give them a chance to enjoy high SEO click-through rates, but often continues into finding other ways to drive higher clicks to target pages over time.
GrowthSRC’s marketing team conducted an in-depth research of 30+ websites across ecommerce, SaaS, B2B and EdTech industries to find out how Google organic CTRs have changed from 2024 to 2025. The study was conducted on 200,000+ keywords across a mix of product pages, collections as well as informational content in the form of blogs and long form reports. The research was conducted after industry-wide chatter about lower organic traffic during the March 2025 core update despite rankings being stable for most of the sites. The main culprit has been the rollout of AI Overviews.
AI Overviews were officially launched during the March 2025 core update and later announced the full US rollout at the Google I/O developer conference. Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai claimed in an interview on the popular show Decoder with The Verge’s Nilay Patel that results ranking AI overviews got higher CTRs than the 10-blue links. Here’s what he said:
"In fact, if you put content and links within AI Overviews, they get higher click-through rates than if you put it outside of AI Overviews"
While this sounded hopeful, early data from industry experts and our own clients showed this wasn’t true. Post AI Overviews launch, we saw a 17.92% decline in organic CTRs across positions #1 to #5 from 2024 to 2025. The results we found in this study were even more surprising.
Some Context on What’s Changed Over the Past 6 Months
Google didn’t just launch the March 2025 core update on March 14, but also secretly increased the amount of AI Overviews significantly across countries and types of queries. Over the years, organic CTRs have consistently gone down as Google moves closer to a Zero-click search.
But it’s not just AI Overviews that are a problem. In ecommerce SERPs, Google quietly launched and scaled its shopping widgets over the past 11 months with the addition of “Popular Products”, “Under X Price” and niche “Product Types” within categories. All of which open up a Google Shopping interface in the same window, and lead the user to the specific website if they click on the product listing. This is another instance of Google moving towards zero-click SERPs while competing with the likes of Amazon to build some sort of marketplace with Google shopping.
While Google remains to be one of the largest drivers of organic clicks to websites, the rise of LLMs like ChatGPT and Perplexity have added to the struggle of marketers to rank across a fragmented search ecosystem.
There have been several studies on the impact of AI Overviews on CTRs and brands are seeing anywhere between 30 to 60% drop in clicks from Google search, largely for informational queries. One of the earliest studies was done by Ahrefs, where they analysed 300,000 keywords and found that click-through rates were down by ~34.5% for top-ranking pages for keywords with AI Overviews in SERPs.
Another instance of abysmal click-through rates after AI Overviews rollout was observed by MailOnline. Carly Steven, SEO and editorial ecommerce director at MailOnline spoke on a panel at the WAN-IFRA World News Media Congress where she informed “On desktop, when we are ranking number one in organic search, it [clickthrough] effectively is about 13% on desktop and about 20% on mobile. When we are still ranking number one organically but there is an AI Overview present, that drops to less than 5% on desktop and 7% on mobile, so a pretty profound change in click-through.” as quoted by The Press Gazzette.
Carly also mentioned that whenever AI Overviews appeared for a keyword, Mail’s average CTR was 56.1% lower on desktop and 48.2% lower on mobile. She described the drop as “pretty shocking”.
While this was enough of an indication for us to acknowledge that informational content is going to suffer across the board, we did an updated research of the current CTRs across the clients and industries GrowthSRC operates in. This study was done in an attempt to bring out the actual picture of the level of growth we can expect as agencies and in-house SEOs when we onboard any client or pitch a new initiative.
At GrowthSRC Media, we have had the privilege of working with 30+ clients across eCommerce, SaaS, Edtech and B2B niches whose data was analysed for the purpose of this study.
Methodology
We extracted Google Search Console data for multiple clients across Ecommerce, SaaS, and B2B industries covering the same time period compared year after year for both 2024 and 2025. The timeframe considered for this analysis was before the full rollout of Products Widgets in 2024 and AI Overviews in 2025, compared to 2025, where both features were rolled out at a global level.
The dataset includes a unified tab combining all GSC queries, with the following metrics: query, clicks, impressions, CTR, and position. We then segmented this data into three content types - product pages, collection pages, and blog pages - to analyze performance trends by content category and SERP features that are unique to each content type. For example, product widgets get triggered for ecommerce queries whereas AI Overviews get triggered for informational searches.
Using aggregated GSC data, we calculated the average click-through rate (CTR) per ranking position for each content type. For every unique position, we also computed the total number of keywords, sum of impressions, and sum of clicks, allowing us to understand position-level behavior across years. For the CTR study, ~74,000 keywords ranking in top 10 positions were selected out of the 200k.
Side note: This aggregated view helped us compare shifts in organic performance between 2024 and 2025 across ecommerce and content-based queries, giving us a clearer picture of evolving search trends and CTR dynamics per SERP position.
On top of this, data from Ahrefs for these keywords was considered to understand SERP features like AI Overviews and Product Widgets for ecommerce queries and how many keywords are getting these features from May 2024 to May 2025.
Data sources
- Ahrefs (Keyword Data for AIO & Product Widgets Features in SERPs)
- Google Search Console (Organic CTR data)
CTR has drastically dropped for Positions #1 and #2 after AI Overviews Rollout
While results ranking in positions #1 and #2 have enjoyed the highest click-through rates for the longest time, AI overviews rollout seems to have affected them in the worst possible way.
Google Scaled AI Overviews for Informational Queries from November 2024
Google officially announced the US rollout of AI overviews at Google I/O developer conference in May 2025. However, after analysing GSC and Ahrefs data of 30+ websites, we noticed that AI overviews rollout started scaling from November 2024 onwards for informational keywords. B2B and SaaS keywords saw the highest SERP feature change because of AI overviews, which is also partly due to the virtue of content play being a larger pull for both industries. The table below runs across a set of 200,000+ keywords tracked across industries (includes keywords ranking in positions 1 to 100).
eCommerce Query CTR Dropped After Product Widgets Rollout
The earliest product widgets were seen around May 2024 for about 15 clients in our portfolio, which were primarily from Home care & improvement, Fashion and Makeup & Beauty niches. There was a significant growth in terms of keywords where SERPs evolved and now show product widgets from November 2024 onwards.
We analysed data for 22,000+ ecommerce keywords (product and collection pages that ranked for high intent purchase keywords), and noticed that all of them now have product widgets in SERPs. What seemed more interesting was that product widgets even showed up for keywords ranking beyond page 1 of Google.
2025 Organic CTR for eCommerce by Position
2025 Organic CTR for Informational Content by Position (with AI Overviews)
Potential Reasons for CTR Increase in Positions #6 to #10
- There might have been changes in how ranking positions are reported in GSC as Google recently added to their official documentation that clicks, impressions and positions for both AI Overviews and AI mode are being tracked in GSC.
- AI overviews are not fully satisfying their intent, hence the user is clicking on results ranking lower in SERPs.
- Repetitive pages ranking in AIO as well as the first 5 search results, leading to source fatigue among visitors.
Where Does Organic Search Go From Here?
Search industry expert and Partner at GrowthSRC Media Mahendra Choudhary also added his inputs on the research:
"With lower clicks to websites from informational content becoming the new normal, this is the perfect time to let your clients and internal stakeholders know that chasing website traffic as a KPI should be thought of differently.
SEO focus should shift to increasing brand authority and awareness via social search, focusing on GEO and increased brand mentions on LLMs and larger focus on organic channel’s impact on revenue or lead growth should be the way forward. As we move toward a zero click SERP, we are at the cusp of SEO as an industry getting reinvented. It will be interesting to see where we go from here."