Google AI Overviews Killed 38% of Clicks in 18 Months. These Five eCommerce Brands Grew Anyway.

It's been 18 months since Google AI Overviews launched at scale. The data is finally in. It's worse than most agencies are telling you — and the brands that figured it out early are pulling away from everyone else.

Here's the data, the brands that beat the trend, and what they did differently.

The numbers (and they hurt)

The studies that matter are aligned on the size of the impact:

Pew Research: users click 8% of the time when an AI Overview is present, vs. 15% without. That's a 47% drop in click rate on AIO-present queries.
Ahrefs analysis of GSC data: 58% drop in CTR for top-ranking pages when AI Overviews appeared.
Multiple field studies aggregated: organic CTR drops 30-38% on triggered queries.
AIO trigger rate: AIO now appears on 42% of all queries.
Zero-click rate: rose from 54% to 72% on AIO queries. In Google's new AI Mode, it climbs to 93%.

Most eCommerce brands we've audited in the last year have lost somewhere between 20% and 40% of total organic sessions even though their rankings are largely unchanged. They're still ranking. The clicks just stopped arriving.

There's one important counter-data point: Seer Interactive found that being cited inside an AI Overview delivered 35% more organic clicks than not being cited. The citation footprint matters more than ever. We covered this in detail in our SEO in the Age of AI post — the brands winning aren't the brands with the most pages, they're the brands inside the citations Google's AI is choosing to display.

The brands that beat the trend

We work with eCommerce brands across email, paid media, and SEO. Five clients posted organic growth in 2025 — not flat, growth — despite the AIO impact. Here's what they did differently. Patterns aggregated, specifics anonymised where the client hasn't published.

Brand 1 — Health & wellness DTC ($30M+ revenue): pivoted entire content strategy to comparison + decision queries

Before AIO, this brand ranked for high-volume informational queries like "best [supplement] for [problem]." Those were exactly the queries AIO ate first. The brand pivoted hard toward comparison-style content ("[Brand A] vs. [Brand B]: which actually works for X?"), decision queries ("Should I take [supplement] before or after meals?"), and buyer-guide content that AIO consistently pulls citations from rather than summarising away.

Result: organic sessions up 18% YoY, with revenue from organic up 31% YoY because comparison-query traffic has dramatically higher commercial intent than the informational traffic it replaced.

Brand 2 — Beverage brand: invested in citation-worthy original data

The shift here was structural. Instead of publishing "10 best practices for [category]" content (cited away by AIO), they invested in original research — small-scale surveys of their own customers, original brewing data, original consumption pattern analysis. Then they made the data freely citable.

Result: cited in AIO on 23% of category queries. Branded search volume up 60% YoY because Perplexity and ChatGPT consistently cite their data when users ask category questions. We covered this same dynamic for Kombucha.com / Raw Brewing Co, where leaning into authentic brand expertise turned the welcome flow into a community-building asset rather than a generic promotional push.

Brand 3 — Apparel: built out internal entity hubs

This brand consolidated their content into entity-based hub pages — one definitive page per major product category, brand pillar, and customer segment, with all related blog content linking up into the parent hub.

Google's Knowledge Graph and AIO both reward this. AI engines look for canonical sources on a topic. Scattered blog content competing with itself doesn't get cited. A consolidated hub does.

Result: 4 of their 6 hub pages now show up in AIO citations consistently. Total organic revenue up 22%.

Brand 4 — Home furnishings ($1.7M revenue, our case study brand): doubled down on email + SEO compounding

This is Simpli Home. When AIO started cutting their informational query traffic, instead of fighting for those clicks, they redirected attention to the consideration cycle that home furnishings buyers actually go through — and built email and SMS journeys that captured intent at the moment the buyer was actually ready.

The organic traffic decline didn't hurt because email-attributed revenue grew 153.6% YoY in the same period. Total revenue grew. Channel mix shifted.

This is the most underrated AIO response: instead of fighting for the click, build the retention machine that monetises the clicks you do get at a much higher rate.

Brand 5 — Spirits retailer: dominated brand search + comparison content

This is TheLiquorStore.com. They built out comparison content (whiskey vs. whiskey, bourbon vs. rye, "what to drink instead of X") that AIO consistently pulls into citations rather than summarising. They also built up their brand search demand through PR, podcast appearances, and partnerships — so when buyers searched for them by name, the SERP was branded and converted at 5x the rate of category-search traffic.

Result: 296.9% YoY attributed revenue growth in Q1 2024, sustained through 2025 even as their informational query traffic was down 25%.

The pattern across all five

Look at what these brands did NOT do. They did not:

Publish more content to "fight back" against AIO
Stuff keywords harder
Buy backlinks
Switch to a different "AI-optimised" CMS
Pivot to TikTok and abandon SEO

What they DID do:

Shifted content toward query types AIO doesn't eat (comparisons, decisions, buyer guides, original data)
Consolidated authority into entity hubs instead of scattering it across 100 blog posts
Built brand search demand through PR, social, partnerships
Doubled down on the retention machine so the clicks they did get monetised at 2-3x the rate
Measured organic revenue, not organic clicks — the metric that actually matters

This is exactly the SEO + content marketing playbook we now run for every client. The brands that adapt to the new environment grow. The brands that try to recreate 2022 SEO are watching their organic traffic compound downward 5-15% every quarter.

What we'd do this quarter for your brand

If you've lost organic traffic in the last 18 months and you're not sure how much is AIO vs. content quality vs. technical issues — here's the audit:

Pull a YoY comparison of your top 50 pages by traffic. Look at impressions vs. clicks. If impressions are flat but clicks are down, that's AIO. If both are down, it's a ranking issue.
Identify which queries are AIO-triggered. Use a tool like Semrush or Ahrefs to flag this. The queries triggering AIO need a different content strategy than the ones that aren't.
Audit citation footprint. Are you cited inside any AIOs? If not, that's your urgent fix. The brands inside the citations are getting 35% more clicks than the brands ranking but not cited.
Build the retention layer. Your email program needs to monetise the clicks you do get at 2-3x the rate. We covered the playbook in our Klaviyo Composer breakdown — the AI is doing more of the routine work now, so the brands building proper foundations are pulling ahead.
Don't panic-publish. More content isn't the answer. Better, denser, more cited content is.

The honest summary

Google AI Overviews are not a temporary disruption. They're the new equilibrium. The brands that adapted in 2024-2025 are now growing. The brands still trying to win the 2022 SEO game are losing 5-15% of organic traffic every quarter and don't know what to do about it.

The fix is real and it's not glamorous. Comparison content. Entity hubs. Original data. Brand search demand. Retention compounding. Done patiently over 6-12 months, it works.

If you want a free audit of where AIO is hurting your specific organic surface — and what we'd change first — book a strategy call. We've done this for clients ranging from $500K to $30M+ and the pattern is consistent. The recovery is possible. It just requires a different playbook than the one most agencies are still selling.

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