What happened

In July 2025 Ahrefs published a number: 76% of the sources cited in Google AI Overviews also ranked in the top 10 organic results for the same keyword. The sample was 1 million AI Overviews and 1.9 million citations. The conclusion felt obvious at the time — rank well, get cited.

In March 2026 they re-ran it. This time the sample was 863,000 keyword SERPs and 4 million cited URLs. The figure came in at 37.9%; counting only standard organic blue links, 37.1%.

Eight months, cut in half.

There is one thing Ahrefs didn’t address, and it belongs up front: the two runs may not have measured the same way. The 2025 study covered 1.9 million citations across 1 million AI Overviews — roughly two or three per answer, the most prominent ones. The 2026 study covered 4 million URLs across 863,000 SERPs, closer to four or five per answer. The citations an AI puts first are the ones most likely to be established top-10 pages, so widening the net from “the most prominent few” to “all of them” naturally pulls in a long tail that sits outside the top 10.

How much of the drop is Google changing and how much is the ruler changing, nobody can say yet. Trust the direction; don’t quote the magnitude as precise.

Why it matters to you

A ranking does two jobs for you: it brings traffic, and it acts as a ticket to being cited. Both are coming loose at once.

On traffic, Ahrefs measured it in February 2026: when an AI Overview appears on the results page, the top-ranking page’s average clickthrough rate is 58% lower than on comparable pages without one. That number needs stating precisely — it’s what remains after subtracting the market-wide decline, the share attributable to AI Overviews alone. In the same dataset, informational keywords with no AI Overview at all still saw first-position CTR fall by close to half over two years.

The ticket is the study above.

Put the two together and the position you spent time and money climbing to is one with half the clicks it used to carry and under a 40% chance of being cited. It still has value. The value is just made of something different now.

What to do about it

One misreading to head off first: this is not “SEO is dead.” The foundations are still the foundations — if your site can’t be crawled, parsed and understood, nothing downstream works.

What changed is the equals sign between the foundation and the ticket. Getting the ranking used to make citation happen as a by-product. Citation is now its own piece of work, and it turns on whether a passage of your content can be lifted out and still make sense, whether it carries concrete facts and sources, and how many credible places describe your brand the same way.

This is awkward to learn on the job. It spans content, technical and off-site work at once, and there is no ranking number that tells you whether you got it right — you find out by asking the AI engines, round after round, and recording whether they mention you and whether they got you right. That loop only means anything if someone runs it consistently; three runs and a pause tells you nothing.

Nobody can tell you where this curve settles, and anyone promising you a timeline is selling something. But 76 to 38 has already happened, and it isn’t going to reverse while you get ready.

If you want to know which side of that line your site is on, we can take a look first.

Further reading