The coverage is no longer partial
As of February 2026, BrightEdge tracks AI Overviews on 48% of queries across monitored industries, up 58% year over year 1. Other trackers place the figure above 50% globally. In practical terms, roughly half of all Google searches now include a machine-generated summary before the traditional results.
The impact on organic clicks is measurable. When an AI Overview is present, users click an organic result 8% of the time, compared to 15% without one 1. Ahrefs measured a 58% drop in click-through rate at position one when AI Overviews appear, though the impact decreases further down the page and concentrates on informational queries 2.
For paid search operators, this is not an SEO story. It is a budget story.
The organic traffic you relied on is shrinking
Many operators, especially in service businesses and SaaS, built acquisition funnels that depend on organic search for the top of the funnel and paid search for the bottom. Blog content ranked for informational queries. Organic traffic filled the remarketing pool. Paid search converted the warm audience.
AI Overviews compress that funnel. When Google answers the informational query directly in the SERP, the user does not click through to your blog post. Your remarketing pool shrinks. Your paid campaigns have fewer warm users to convert. The cost of generating demand, not just capturing it, shifts toward paid.
This does not mean organic is dead. Organic CTR on queries with AI Overviews climbed from 1.3% in December 2025 to 2.4% in February 2026, showing some recovery 1. And being cited inside an AI Overview delivers 35% more organic clicks than not being cited 3. But the absolute click volume is lower, and it is not coming back to pre-AIO levels.
What this changes for paid search budgets
If your organic traffic has declined 20 to 40% on informational queries over the past year, you are already feeling this. The question is whether to absorb the loss or replace it with paid.
For high-intent commercial queries, the math is simpler: paid search ads still appear above the AI Overview in most SERPs, and the click-through rate on those ads has not degraded the same way organic has. If you are bidding on queries where the user is ready to act, the AI Overview is mostly irrelevant because the user scrolls past it to the ad or clicks the ad above it.
For mid-funnel informational queries, the calculation is harder. Running paid on "how to choose a CRM" or "best practices for email deliverability" is expensive, and the conversion rate on those clicks is low because the user is researching, not buying. But if you do not reach that user during the research phase, they do not enter your funnel at all.
The practical answer for most operators: do not try to replace all lost organic traffic with paid. Instead, identify the five to ten informational queries that generate the most downstream conversions, and run paid on those specifically. Let the rest go. Concentration beats diversification here, too.
Optimize for the AI Overview, not just the SERP
If your content gets cited inside the AI Overview, you recover some of the click loss. The 35% uplift from citation is meaningful. Writing content that gets cited requires specific structural choices: clear, direct answers in the first paragraph; specific numbers and named examples; structured data markup; and content that resolves the query rather than teasing an answer behind a click.
This is the same principle that drives good paid search landing pages. The AI Overview rewards content that answers the question concretely. The paid search landing page converts when it delivers something the SERP did not. Both reward specificity over vagueness.
The query you should monitor
Watch your Search Console data for queries where your impressions are stable but clicks are declining. That gap is the AI Overview absorbing the click. Cross-reference those queries with your paid search campaigns. If you are bidding on the same query in paid, check whether your paid CTR has changed. If paid CTR is stable while organic CTR drops, the AI Overview is stealing from organic and leaving paid alone. That is the best case. If both are dropping, the AI Overview is satisfying the query entirely, and neither organic nor paid will recover that traffic without a different approach.