Yes, and for most businesses it is actually working better than a lot of the panic online suggests. AI Overviews now show up on roughly 48 to 50 percent of US Google searches, and tools like ChatGPT have genuinely changed how people research before they buy. But paid search clicks have held up far better than organic clicks through this shift, and in some ways Google has protected ad revenue specifically by keeping ads visible alongside AI Overviews rather than burying them. If you are running Google Ads well, the AI search shift is a smaller problem for you than it is for anyone relying on free organic traffic.
The headline number is real: AI Overviews went from appearing on about 6.5 percent of US queries in January 2025 to roughly half of all queries by early 2026. That is a genuinely massive shift in how search results pages look, and it has hit organic traffic hard. Organic click-through rate on queries that trigger an AI Overview fell sharply through 2025, and Pew Research found people click a traditional blue link only about 8 percent of the time when an AI Overview is present, compared to 15 percent when it is not.
If you only read that stat, it sounds like the end of search advertising. It is not, because ads and organic results are not affected the same way.
Two things are happening at once. First, Google has been steadily expanding how often ads appear on pages that also show an AI Overview, going from around 3 percent of those results pages in January 2025 to roughly 40 percent by November 2025. Ads are not being pushed out by AI Overviews, they are being placed next to and around them.
Second, the click-through rate on those ads has stayed remarkably stable. Paid search CTR on brand-cited queries held in a narrow band, roughly 14 to 18 percent, through all of 2025 and into 2026, with no meaningful decline even as organic CTR was dropping. Paid clicks are also consistently outperforming organic clicks on the same AI Overview pages. In practical terms, the people who do click through are still landing on ads at a similar rate to before, while free organic clicks have taken most of the hit.
This lines up with what Google reported financially. Alphabet’s Q4 2025 earnings showed Search revenue up 17 percent year over year to just over 63 billion dollars, with GenAI product revenue up around 400 percent. Google has an enormous financial incentive to keep ads working inside the new AI-driven search experience, and the numbers so far show that incentive playing out.
The businesses genuinely getting hurt by AI Overviews are the ones that depended entirely on unpaid, top-of-funnel organic traffic, especially for informational content. If your site made money from ad impressions or affiliate clicks on “what is X” style articles, that traffic has been squeezed hard, sometimes by more than a third on AI Overview-triggering queries.
That is a different business model to most of the people reading a Google Ads troubleshooting blog. If you are running paid search because you sell a product or service and need qualified leads or sales, your risk is smaller and more specific:
Do not restructure your campaigns around AI Overviews specifically. There is no AI Overview targeting setting, and chasing this shift with big account changes usually causes more damage than the shift itself. Instead:
AI Overviews and AI chatbots have changed how people search, but they have not broken Google Ads. Paid click-through rates have stayed stable while organic click-through rates absorbed most of the disruption, and Google has been actively expanding ad placement alongside AI Overviews rather than removing it. If your account is well structured, your conversion tracking is accurate, and you are watching the right metrics, the AI search shift is a trend to monitor, not a reason to abandon paid search.
