Two datasets landed that sharpen the firm’s read on the AI Overviews impact on paid search, and one of them updates a claim we made in May. Zero-click crossed 68% of US Google searches in early 2026, while paid CTR on SERPs where an AI Overview appears has been rising even as paid CTR on SERPs without one falls. Fewer clicks leave the results page, and the ones that do are skewing paid on the pages where Google answers first. The auction is concentrating into fewer, more considered clicks.
Zero-click crossed 68 percent, with caveats worth keeping
The headline number: 68.01% of US Google searches ended without a click to the open web between January and April 2026, per SparkToro’s analysis of Similarweb desktop and mobile clickstream data, up from 60.45% in 2024 1 2. In the same dataset, AI Overviews appear on more than 20% of searches, and when one is present, click-through rates drop by nearly 60% 1. AI Mode, for all the coverage it gets, was just 0.34% of searches in the study window 1.
Two caveats travel with the number, and the coverage itself flags them: the historical comparisons use different data providers, and the clickstream panel excludes the Google mobile app 1. So read the 68% as a directional confirmation of what every operator already sees in Search Console, not as a precision instrument. The direction is not in dispute. Zero-click searches in 2026 are the majority case by a wide margin, and the open web receives a shrinking share of whatever remains.
For a paid account, the raw zero-click rate is the wrong number to panic over anyway. What matters is what happens to the clicks that survive, and that is where the second dataset gets interesting.
Paid CTR is rising where AI Overviews appear
Seer Interactive’s April 2026 update, drawn from 53 brands, 5.47 million tracked queries, 2.43 billion organic impressions, and 296.9 million paid impressions between January 2025 and February 2026, found that paid CTR on SERPs with an AIO present rose from 14.64% to 16.21%, while paid CTR on SERPs without an AIO fell from 25.98% to 21.85% 3.
We wrote in May, in our first read on AI Overviews and paid search, that paid ads above an AI Overview held stable while organic CTR halved. Seer’s full-year data says the stronger claim is now supportable: AIO paid CTR is rising, not just holding. The searcher who reads an AI answer and still clicks an ad is a more considered clicker than the one who reflexively hit the first blue link in 2023, and the ads on those SERPs are earning a growing share of a shrinking click pool.
The falling number matters as much as the rising one. Non-AIO SERPs are where most transactional money is spent, and a paid CTR sliding from 25.98% to 21.85% on those pages means the ordinary auction is getting less generous even where no AI answer intervenes. Nothing in this data hands anyone a reason to relax; it hands you a reason to know which of the two SERPs each dollar is buying.
Hold the two datasets apart while you reconcile them, because they measure different things. SparkToro counts clicks across a clickstream panel of all search behavior; Seer measures CTR across a 53-brand advertiser panel. Their AIO presence rates differ too, which is normal across these studies: our May piece cited a 48% presence figure from a different methodology, against SparkToro’s 20%-plus. The honest synthesis is that total clicks are falling, AIO presence estimates vary with the query sample, and the clicks that survive on AIO SERPs are increasingly paid ones. All three can be true at once, and per this data, they are.
Being cited inside the AI Overview is now a measurable asset
The same Seer panel puts a number on citation for the first time in a way we find usable. Brands cited inside an AI Overview earn roughly 120% more organic clicks per impression than uncited brands on the same SERPs, though still about 38% below no-AIO levels 3. Organic CTR with an AIO present also rebounded from a 1.31% floor in December 2025 to 2.36% in February 2026 3.
That 120% gap is the budget argument for citability. Getting your brand named inside the answer is content and digital PR work, not ad work: the AIO cites pages that answer the question plainly, carry named data, and come from sources the model trusts. It is the same writing discipline that gets a brand recommended inside ChatGPT or Perplexity, which we covered in our piece on ChatGPT ads. No bid gets you into the answer box. A page that deserves to be quoted does.
The rebound in organic CTR from the December floor also suggests searchers are recalibrating rather than abandoning the results page. The first months of any interface change overweight the shock; the panel data through February shows clicks partially returning to the SERPs users have learned to read.
Audit your converting queries by trigger rate
The paid search implications of Google AI Overviews split cleanly by query type, and Seer’s trigger rates make the audit mechanical. Comparison-style queries trigger an AIO 95.4% of the time, question queries 85.9%, and transactional queries only 5% 3.
So the operator move this month is a two-column exercise: pull the last 90 days of converting queries from the search terms report, classify each as transactional, comparison, or question, and spot-check the top 50 in a clean browser session to record which ones surface an AI Overview today. The trigger rates make the classification predictive rather than anecdotal; you are not guessing where the AIO will show up, you are confirming it. Your transactional and local-intent terms, which is most of the money for the service businesses in the accounts we run, live almost entirely in the 5% world; the auction there works the way it did two years ago, and the zero-click headlines mostly do not apply to it. Your comparison and question queries face an AI answer nearly every time, which means the ad is competing with a synthesized response, not just with other ads, and it earns its keep only when the click it buys is worth more than the answer the searcher already read.
That is also where organic died first. Informational content that ranked to catch top-of-funnel queries now feeds an answer box that keeps the visit, so the choice on those queries is between paying for the smaller, more considered click pool and doing the citability work that gets you named inside the answer itself. Most accounts should do the second before expanding the first, because the citation compounds while the click is rented.
One number in the SparkToro data argues against overcorrecting toward the shiniest surface: AI Mode at 0.34% of searches. The interfaces getting the conference keynotes are not yet where the volume is. The volume is on ordinary SERPs that now open with a synthesized answer, and that is the surface the audit above prices.
The auction is not collapsing; it is distilling. Every quarter of this data says the same thing from a different angle: fewer clicks, dearer clicks, more deliberate clickers. The operators who know which of their queries face an AI answer, and fund each side accordingly, are buying a different and better product than the ones still reading blended CTR and wondering why it fell.