We have analysed over 100 million keywords to measure the impact of AI Overviews on Google Search in Germany. The result: click-through rates are dropping, but not equally for everyone.
Set aside your existing assumptions about AI Overviews and let’s look at the data. If you’re short on time, here are the key findings:
- AI Overviews are displayed for around 20% of keywords in Germany
- The CTR at position 1 drops from 27% to 11%, a loss of almost 60%
- AI Overviews cost 265 million organic clicks per month in Germany
- The average click loss across all keywords stands at 6.6%
- The impact varies greatly by industry: from 1% to over 24% click loss
- Biggest absolute loser in Germany: Wikipedia with 31.6 million clicks per month
- Biggest proportional losers in Germany: Specialised health portals with over 30%
Got a bit more time? Here is the full analysis in detail:
What are AI Overviews?
Since May 2025, Google has also been showing so-called AI Overviews in Germany and Europe: AI-generated answers that appear directly on the search results page.
AI Overviews are essentially Featured Snippets on steroids. Instead of displaying a single source, Google now summarises multiple websites and presents the answer prominently above the classic search results. The user gets their answer without having to click. Convenient for them, problematic for everyone who depends on organic traffic.
20% of keywords in Germany show AI Overviews
At present, AI Overviews are displayed for just over 20 percent of keywords in Germany. This level has been fairly consistent for some time: whilst Google steadily showed more AI Overviews in the first few months, growth has stagnated over recent months. Featured Snippets have not disappeared entirely, but are becoming increasingly rare.
The further keywords move towards the long tail, the more frequently we see AI Overviews. In the long tail, the rates are around 30% of keywords with AI Overview integration. This is also because Google is currently not displaying AI Overviews for keywords with shopping integration.
78.6% of AI Overviews appear at the very top
At 78.6%, just under four fifths of AI Overviews are displayed above the organic SERPs. The remainder appears further down the search results page, and therefore only after the first organic results. Google now appears to be able to determine very precisely whether organic results or AI answers are of greater initial interest to searchers for a given keyword.
CTR at position 1: from 27% to 11%
The distribution of click-through rates between average search results pages and SERPs with an AI Overview clearly illustrates the difference. Whilst on average over 27% of searchers click on the first result, for keywords with an AI Overview this figure drops to just 11%. The click loss at position 1 is therefore almost 60%. At further positions the difference is smaller, but click-through rates are consistently around 25 to 30 percent below average.
Whilst an average search leads to a click on one of the organic results in 57% of cases, for searches with an AI Overview this figure drops to just 33%. Nearly half of all organic clicks are lost.
265 million lost clicks per month in Germany
This has concrete consequences: in Germany, AI Overviews cost a total of 265 million organic clicks from Google per month. The absolute figure is considerable, though in percentage terms it amounts to just around 6.6% of all organic clicks in Germany.
6.6% sounds manageable. Yet this average figure masks the reality: the impact of AI Overviews varies massively depending on the topic and focus of a website. Whilst some categories are barely affected, others lose almost a quarter of their organic clicks. Let’s take a look at who is affected and to what extent.
Click loss by category: from 1% to 24%
The range is enormous. Whilst recipe sites in Germany such as Chefkoch lose just over 1% of their organic clicks through AI Overviews, parenting portals and baby sites lose over 24%.
The pattern is clear: categories with informational search queries are most severely affected. Those who answer questions about health, parenting or home improvement are now competing directly with Google’s AI-generated answers. For transactional searches such as shopping or travel bookings, Google holds back.
Recipes with just 1.07% click loss may seem surprising at first glance. However, recipes are structured content that users want to follow step by step. An AI summary cannot replace that.
News & media with 7.37% also falls well below the average. News content is time-critical, often opinion-led and requires source attribution. Google apparently does not yet trust itself to produce AI summaries here.
The biggest losers: absolute and proportional
Who loses the most? That depends on how you measure it.
In absolute figures in Germany, Wikipedia leads with 31.6 million lost clicks per month. This sounds dramatic, but amounts to only 5.56% of Wikipedia’s traffic from Google. Behind it come DocCheck (4.8m), AOK (4.0m), ADAC (3.1m) and Pons (3.1m) — all major German-market websites.
Proportionally, the list looks different. Here, specialised health portals in Germany lead the way: lumedis.de loses 30.15% of its organic clicks, ratgeber-herzinsuffizienz.de 29.71%, herzstiftung.de 29.66%. The pattern: the more specific the questions a site answers, the more likely Google is to provide the answer itself.
At the other end of the scale in Germany: wetter.com loses only 0.18%, Booking.com 0.46%, Idealo 0.85%, Amazon 1.73%. Those who facilitate transactions rather than answer questions remain largely unaffected.
Conclusion
AI Overviews have arrived in Germany. 265 million lost clicks per month.
But what matters is where you stand. Are you running a health portal that answers questions? Then you may be losing a quarter of your organic traffic. Are you running an online shop? Then you will barely notice a thing.
The direction is clear: Google wants to answer informational search queries itself. Those who have previously relied on answering straightforward questions need to rethink their approach. Either you deliver content that an AI summary cannot replace. Or you optimise to be cited as a source within AI Overviews.
Search volume as the sole metric for evaluating keywords has definitively had its day. Whether AI Overviews are displayed and how much they suppress click-through rates must henceforth be factored into every keyword analysis.
We will continue to monitor developments and update the data on a regular basis.
