You search for "how much does a kitchen refit cost" and Google gives you a paragraph with the answer, three tips and a couple of small links off to the side. For the person searching, perfect. For the company that wrote the guide Google drew on, rather less so: it did the work, it was cited, and nobody came in.
That is what is happening with Google's AI summaries (AI Overviews) and with AI Mode. Before deciding anything, it helps to separate what is known from what blogs repeat, because plenty of figures in this area have no traceable origin. What follows is only what I could trace back to the original study, with its date and its limits.
What the data says
Pew Research Center tracked the real browsing of 900 US adults during March 2025. Out of 68,879 Google searches, 18% showed an AI summary. When there was a summary, users clicked a traditional link on 8% of visits, against 15% when there was none. Only 1% clicked a link inside the summary itself. And they ended their browsing session after the search 26% of the time, against 16%. It is all in the Pew study. It is the US, it is Google and the sample is small, but it is one of the few measurements based on real behaviour rather than estimates.
Ahrefs compares position-one CTR on searches with and without an AI summary. In its February 2026 update it calculates that the page in position 1 gets 58% fewer clicks than expected when a summary appears (the first version, from April 2025, said 34.5%). Ahrefs itself flags three caveats: it is a correlation, the 58% comes from a forecasting model, and the data is desktop only.
Seer Interactive measured 3,119 informational queries from 42 organisations between June 2024 and September 2025. Organic CTR on queries that ended up with an AI summary fell from 1.76% to 0.61%. Queries without one also fell (from 2.72% to 1.62%), so it is not all down to AI. Brands cited in the summary also had slightly better CTR than uncited ones (0.70% against 0.52%), although the authors say they cannot prove that being cited is the cause.
Study | What it measures | Figure | Limit |
|---|---|---|---|
Pew (Mar 2025) | Clicks with and without a summary | 8% vs 15% | US, 900 people |
Ahrefs (Dec 2025) | Position-one CTR | 58% lower than expected | Correlation, desktop |
Seer (Sep 2025) | Organic CTR, informational queries | 1.76% to 0.61% | Informational queries only |
And what about people ready to buy?
This is what matters most to a business, and what is least known. An Ahrefs analysis of 146 million results (desktop, September 2025) found an AI summary on 21.4% of informational searches, 4.3% of commercial ones, 2.1% of transactional ones and 0.9% of navigational ones. In other words, someone who already knows what they want is far less exposed to the summary.
But that split is moving. Semrush measured, between November 2025 and April 2026 and across more than 600,000 US keywords, that the presence of summaries on commercial searches grew by 71%, while on transactional ones it fell by 5%.
What I have not found is a reliable study on whether those "decision" searches convert better or worse when AI is in the middle. Google states in its documentation that clicks from these features are "higher quality", but that is its own claim, with no published data alongside it. Take it for what it is.
What you can control
Google is clear on one thing: there are no additional requirements or special optimisations to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode. The page must be indexed and eligible to be shown with a snippet. That is all. Everything else is the usual good practice, with a different focus.
Content that answers the question of someone about to decide
If the summary takes the "what is" and "how to" questions, what is left for you as a business is the "who with" and "how much" questions. Those are the pages to write well:
- Service pages that really answer. What is included, what is not, who it is for, how you work, how long it takes. If you do not publish prices, say what the price depends on. "Get in touch" answers nothing.
- A contact page with no friction. Phone or form in plain sight, opening hours, the area you cover, what happens after someone writes.
- Real FAQs, the ones customers ask you by phone and email, not the ones a copywriter made up. Each answer should stand on its own: if a summary quotes it, it must make sense without the rest of the page.
- Something an AI does not have: your process, your documented cases, your photos, your terms. The summary can repeat the generic; it has nowhere to get yours.
One practical point: the important text must be in HTML, not inside an image or a scanned PDF. Google also points to good page experience and solid internal linking. If your site is old and these pages do not exist or are buried three levels down, that is one of the reasons that does justify a redesign.
Structured data, with realistic expectations
Structured data (schema.org) helps Google understand who you are and what you offer: organisation or local business, services, FAQs. But Google says no special markup is needed for these features, and that what you mark up must match what is visible on the page. Use it to organise your information, not as a trick to get into the summaries.
llms.txt: the evidence is thin
The llms.txt file proposes giving AI systems a tidy list of your pages. Google's documentation on these features does not mention it and says you do not need "AI text files". Google's John Mueller stated in 2025 that no AI system uses it and that chatbots fetch your pages but not that file. If you already have one, no harm done; if not, do not start there. Our free check looks for it, but as one more data point, not as a pass mark.
AI crawlers: let them in or not
This is a business decision, not a technical one. The bots are not all the same. According to OpenAI's documentation:
Crawler | What it is for | If you block it |
|---|---|---|
OAI-SearchBot | Showing sites in ChatGPT's search answers | You will not appear in those answers (at most as a navigational link) |
GPTBot | Training OpenAI models | You signal you do not want your content used for training; search is unaffected |
ChatGPT-User | Visits triggered by an individual user | It does not decide whether you appear in search; robots.txt may not apply |
On Google there are two separate things. Search Console has a per-property switch that takes your site out of AI Overviews, AI Mode and the AI summaries in Discover without removing it from the normal results; it has been available worldwide since 31 August 2026. There are also nosnippet and max-snippet, but those limit the snippet Google shows from your pages across all of Search. And Google-Extended limits use in training and grounding in some other Google systems, not in the summaries.
A business that lives on being found usually wants to allow the search bots, and leaving the summaries does not look like a good idea either. Cyrus Shepard tried it on one site: AI impressions fell to zero, as expected, but clicks from the normal results dropped too. He also estimates a CTR of around 0.9% on AI impressions. He calls it a small case study himself, so treat it as a clue, not a rule.
Blocking training is a separate, legitimate decision that each owner makes based on their content. It will soon be simpler: Google, Bing, OpenAI and Anthropic plan to adopt a shared signal in robots.txt, based on a proposal still under discussion at the IETF. Google expects to support it in early 2027. There is nothing to do today, and it only covers training.
Measuring what arrives
Without measuring, all of this is faith.
- Google Search Console. Traffic from AI Overviews and AI Mode is still included in the totals of the performance report, under the "Web" type. On top of that, Performance now has a generative AI report, open to all sites since 31 August. It gives impressions by page, country, device and date, but no clicks or queries, and it only appears if your site has enough impressions. Cross-check it with each page's clicks under "Web": plenty of AI impressions and few clicks is the sign that something is answering on your behalf.
- Google Analytics 4. Its default AI Assistant channel groups visits from ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, Copilot or Grok. Clicks from AI Overviews and AI Mode do not land there: they count as organic search. Other assistants, such as Perplexity or Claude, are not among Google's examples, so they may end up under "Referral"; look at your own reports before trusting the channel.
- Calls, forms and WhatsApp. If your business closes by phone, the click is no longer the measure. Ask "how did you find us?" and write it down.
A short checklist
- Check that your service, pricing (or what it depends on) and contact pages answer what someone about to decide would ask.
- Run our free AI-ready check to see crawlers, structured data and llms.txt at a glance.
- Decide which bots you let in and record it in your
robots.txt. - Make sure the key text is in HTML and that structured data matches what is visible.
- Look at Search Console and GA4 once a month with one question: are impressions rising and clicks falling on your informational pages? Then those pages are no longer your source of visits; perhaps they are your shop window.
AI Mode has worked in Spanish since September 2025 and, according to the press, reached Spain that October. The figures in this article are from the US and almost all from SEO vendors (Pew aside): they show the trend, not what will happen to your site. If you spot any outdated information, let us know and we will correct it.