---
title: "AI Overview traffic decline: seven claims, four hold up"
url: https://seomadman.com/reports/ai-overview-traffic-decline-estimates-compared
section: reports
published: 2026-06-09T00:00:00.000Z
modified: 2026-06-09T00:00:00.000Z
author: Adam Hafez
topics: ["AI search"]
---

# AI Overview traffic decline: seven claims, four hold up

## The short answer

Independent measurements of how much AI Overviews cut publisher traffic disagree sharply: a randomized field experiment found outbound clicks fell 39.8%, an agency's client-data analysis found organic click-through rate down 61%, and disclosed company figures range from Chegg's 24% revenue decline to a disputed HubSpot estimate of 70 to 80%. None of these figures measure the same thing.

## Key takeaways

- The first randomized field experiment on AI Overviews, posted to SSRN in April 2026, found outbound organic clicks fell 39.8% when an AI Overview appeared.
- Seer Interactive's client-data analysis, updated in September 2025, found organic click-through rate on AI-Overview queries fell 61%, from 1.76% in June 2024 to 0.61%.
- A Reuters Institute report published in January 2026, using Chartbeat data from over 2,500 publisher sites, found global Google referral traffic down about a third year over year.
- Chegg disclosed a 24% year-over-year revenue decline in its own February 2025 earnings report and has since sued Google, naming AI Overviews as a cause.
- A widely repeated claim that HubSpot lost 70 to 80% of its blog traffic traces to third-party SEO-tool estimates that HubSpot's own blog post disputes as overstated.

Ask how much AI Overviews have cut into search traffic and the honest answer is: it depends which
of at least seven claims you mean, and they were not all measuring the same thing. We checked each
one against its original source rather than repeating whichever number showed up first in a search.
Four trace to distinct, credible, dated studies with real methodology behind them. Three did not
hold up as independent measurements and are excluded below rather than repeated.

## The figures that check out

**A randomized field experiment: outbound clicks down 39.8%.** Saharsh Agarwal (Indian School of
Business) and Ananya Sen (Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz College) built a Chrome extension that
randomly assigned 1,065 US-based participants to see AI Overviews or have them hidden, across
68,089 searches. Conditional on an AI Overview appearing, outbound organic clicks fell 39.8% and
zero-click searches rose 34.5%, with no measurable gain in reported satisfaction or information
quality. The paper was first posted to SSRN on 3 April 2026 and last revised 17 June 2026. It is
the only figure in this report built on random assignment rather than a before-and-after comparison,
which is what lets the authors call the effect causal rather than correlational.

**An agency's client data: organic click-through rate down 61%.** Seer Interactive tracks 3,119
informational search terms across 42 client organizations, pulling Google Search Console and Google
Ads data alongside third-party AI Overview presence tracking. Its September 2025 update found
organic click-through rate on queries where an AI Overview appeared fell from 1.76% in June 2024 to
0.61%, a 61% relative drop, against 25.1 million tracked organic impressions. This is not a random
sample of the web; it is Seer's own client accounts, weighted toward the query types most exposed to
AI Overviews in the first place.

**Industry-wide referral data: publisher traffic down about a third.** The Reuters Institute for the
Study of Journalism's Journalism and Technology Trends and Predictions 2026 report, published 12
January 2026, cites Chartbeat data across more than 2,500 publisher sites showing global Google
search referral traffic down roughly a third year over year to November 2025. A separate Chartbeat
cut reported by Axios in March 2026 found the decline was uneven by publisher size: about 22% for
large publishers, 47% for medium ones, and 60% for small ones, over the same kind of window. Neither
figure isolates AI Overviews from the rest of how Google's results page has changed; both describe
referral traffic broadly.

**One company's own disclosed number: revenue down 24%.** Chegg reported fourth-quarter 2024 revenue
of $143.5 million, down 24% year over year, in its own 24 February 2025 earnings release, and has
since sued Google, naming AI Overviews as a cause of its traffic and revenue decline. This is the
only figure in the set that is a company's own audited financial disclosure rather than a
third-party traffic estimate, and it measures revenue, not clicks or visits.

## The figures we could not verify, and why

**"Business Insider down 55%, April 2022 to April 2025" does not trace cleanly to that number.**
The underlying reporting is real: the Wall Street Journal, via Similarweb data, reported in June
2025 that organic search traffic to Business Insider, HuffPost and the Washington Post was down
roughly 50% over three years, and that the New York Times' organic-search traffic share fell from
44% to 36.5% over the same period. The specific "55%, April 2022 to April 2025" framing that
circulates in SEO blogs is a more precise restatement than the original reporting supports, so this
report uses the traceable ~50%-over-three-years figure instead and does not repeat the sharper
number.

**CNN's decline is Similarweb-via-press, not a named study.** The New York Post reported in July
2025, citing Similarweb, that CNN.com traffic fell 28% year over year to 311.7 million visits. That
figure is real and traceable. The wider "27 to 38%" range attached to CNN elsewhere in SEO content
compiles several different comparison windows into one number without naming which is which, so this
report cites the one figure with a clear source and period (28%, year over year to mid-2025) and
drops the compiled range.

**HubSpot's 70 to 80% is a disputed third-party estimate, not HubSpot's own figure.** SEO-tool
analyses (Surfer, AthenaHQ and others) estimate HubSpot's organic blog traffic fell from roughly 24
million monthly visits to 6 to 7 million between late 2024 and early 2025, a 70 to 75% drop by their
own math. HubSpot's own July 2026 blog post engages with these estimates directly and argues they
overstate the decline and ignore a deliberate multi-year shift away from blog pageviews toward
YouTube, podcasts and newsletters. This report includes the claim because it is traceable to named
tools and HubSpot's own response, but treats it as the least reliable figure here: an outside
estimate the subject itself contests.

## Why these are not directly comparable

**They measure different metrics.** A click count, a click-through rate, total site visits, and
company revenue are four different numbers that can move independently. Click-through rate can fall
even when raw clicks hold steady, if impressions rise faster; revenue can fall for reasons that have
nothing to do with search, including layoffs, pricing changes or a shrinking market. Reading any one
of these as a stand-in for "traffic" erases what it actually counted.

**They cover different query sets and site types.** The SSRN experiment used a general panel of US
searchers across whatever queries they ran. Seer Interactive's client accounts are weighted toward
informational queries, the category most exposed to AI Overviews. Chegg is a single company in
education technology; CNN and Business Insider are general news. A 39.8% average across all query
types and an 81% estimate for one company's blog are not describing the same population, even before
either number's own uncertainty is considered.

**They cover different, overlapping time windows.** The SSRN data was collected in early 2026; Seer's
comparison starts in June 2024; the Reuters Institute figure is year-over-year to November 2025;
Chegg's is a single quarter against the same quarter a year earlier. AI Overviews expanded in reach
and query coverage across all of this period, so a study run later is measuring a more mature,
further-rolled-out feature than one run in 2024, independent of any difference in method.

## Why we care

**A single "AI Overviews cut traffic by X%" headline number is not a complete claim.** Whether the
right figure for a forecast is 24%, 39.8%, 61% or something closer to 80% depends entirely on
whether you are modeling clicks, click-through rate, total visits or revenue, for what kind of query,
over what window, and that dependency is exactly what most quoted versions of this stat strip out.

**The rigor of the source matters more than the size of the number.** A randomized experiment with a
modest 39.8% effect is stronger evidence than an unverified 80% estimate the subject company
disputes. Before using any AI Overview traffic figure in a deck or a forecast, trace it to its
original study, note whether the design was randomized or observational, and check that its metric
matches the one you actually need.

## Frequently asked questions

### Which AI Overview traffic decline figure is the most reliable?

The 39.8% figure, because it is the only one built on randomized assignment rather than an observational comparison. Saharsh Agarwal and Ananya Sen's field experiment randomly hid or showed AI Overviews to 1,065 people, which is the one design here that can support a causal claim rather than a correlation.

### Why do Seer Interactive's numbers and the SSRN study disagree so much?

They measure different things for different populations. Seer's 61% figure is a click-through-rate drop, clicks divided by impressions, on informational queries inside 42 client accounts. The SSRN study measures the count of outbound clicks per search across a general panel. A CTR can fall by more than a click count falls if impressions on AI-Overview queries also rose over the same period, which is what Seer's own data shows.

### Is the HubSpot 70 to 80% figure real?

It is a real, traceable estimate from third-party SEO tools, not a number HubSpot itself has confirmed. HubSpot's own July 2026 blog post addresses the claim directly and argues the decline is smaller and partly a deliberate strategic shift away from blog pageviews, not solely an AI Overview effect.

## Sources

1. [The Impact of Google AI Overviews on Publisher Traffic and User Experience: Evidence from a Field Experiment](https://ssrn.com/abstract=6513059) - SSRN (Saharsh Agarwal, Indian School of Business; Ananya Sen, Carnegie Mellon University) (primary)
2. [AIO Impact on Google CTR: September 2025 Update](https://www.seerinteractive.com/insights/aio-impact-on-google-ctr-september-2025-update) - Seer Interactive (primary)
3. [Journalism and Technology Trends and Predictions 2026](https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2026-01/Trends_and_Predictions_2026.pdf) - Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (primary)
4. [Exclusive: Small publishers hit hardest by search traffic declines](https://www.axios.com/2026/03/17/chartbeat-search-traffic-ai-chatbots) - Axios
5. [Google's AI search features are killing traffic to publishers](https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/10/googles-ai-overviews-are-killing-traffic-for-publishers/) - TechCrunch
6. [Top news sites suffer drastic drop in web traffic since Google added AI search](https://www.yahoo.com/news/top-news-sites-suffer-drastic-214616304.html) - New York Post
7. [Chegg Reports 2024 Fourth Quarter and Full Year Financial Results](https://www.chegg.com/about/newsroom/press-release/chegg-reports-2024-fourth-quarter-and-full-year-financial-results) - Chegg, Inc. (primary)
8. [Did HubSpot Really Lose 80% of Blog Traffic? Here's What Actually Happened, and What It Means for Marketers](https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/blog-traffic-loss-explainer) - HubSpot (primary)