Pew Data Confirms : 50% Reduction in SERP Click Through Rates

Brett Tabkeon

In a new study published July 22, Pew Research Center confirmed what we have seen in  analytics since Google's AIO/SOT Serps began showing up in search results: click-through rates are crashing - hard!

Pew's analysis, based on browsing by 30k U.S. adults in March 2025, puts stark hard numbers to the reality that SOT (Slop On Top) is cannibalizing organic traffic.

Users who encountered an AI summary clicked on a traditional search result link in 8% of all visits. Those who did not encounter an AI summary clicked on a search result nearly twice as often (15% of visits).

That's a 46% drop in CTR for organic links, simply because the AI box was present.

To make it worse: just 1% of sessions resulted in users clicking within the AI-generated summary itself. That means the "value" of being cited inside the AI box - at least in terms of traffic - is close to negligible and worst - nonexistent.

It's Not Just CTR - The Query Model Has Changed

AI Overviews are far more likely to trigger on very long, specific prompted queries and full-sentence questions - exactly the type of queries SEOs have traditionally optimized for when aiming at featured snippets and voice search (booyeah)!

According to Pew:

  • For searches of 10+ words, 53% included an AIO
  • For short queries (1 - 2 words), just 8% returned AIO
  • If the query included both a noun and a verb, 36% resulted in an AIO box.
  • Questions starting with "who," "what," "why," etc., had 60% AI summary coverage.

Obviously, this is a wholesale reshaping of Google's SERP behavior. Long-tail informational queries are now far more likely to get intercepted by the AI, stripping publishers out of the loop of the very traffic those queries used to deliver AND, the very queries that made that site show up in the first place. eg: Google is leveraging your content to produce their content and offering nothing in return.

Google searches that contain more words, ask questions or use full sentences tend to produce AI summaries more often.


Other Sources:

  • CTR on first result dropped from 7.3% ? 2.6% (DCN).(Writesonic)
  • Search volume impacted: ~60% (Ahrefs).
  • Click-through shifts: 36% ? 23% for AI-present queries (Barron's).
  • These AI summaries correlate with an average CTR drop of 34.5% for top-ranking pages (Emarketer).