AI Overviews and AI Mode accounted for about 21% of one site’s Google search clicks, according to an estimate by SEO consultant Cyrus Shepard, who took the site out of Google’s AI features for four weeks. Adding a small lift in regular-listing clicks that he attributes to AI visibility, he puts the share tied to AI features at 23%.
Shepard, founder of Zyppy SEO, excluded Zyppy’s site using Search Console’s Search generative AI control on Sept. 1 and opted back in on Sept. 29, then published the results in his newsletter on Thursday.
He describes it as a single experiment on a single site and wrote that readers should treat the findings “more as a directional yardstick than Google gospel” and not assume the numbers apply to other sites.
What Happened When The Site Opted Out
In less than an hour, Shepard said Zyppy’s website disappeared from the AI features on Google. Prior to this, the website was receiving anywhere from 500 to 1,000 impressions per day through AI Overviews and AI Mode, which accounted for approximately 10% of all impressions of the site via Google searches.
The help center for Google explains that exclusions generally take several days, and that Google does not consider the exclusion as a ranking or inclusion signal for other parts of its Search function.
He showed an example search where the website remained at number 1 in standard results following the exclusion but didn’t appear in the AI features, not even as a link. Following the switch back after 28 days, AI impressions returned to the site nearly as fast.
How Shepard Estimated AI Clicks
Shepard estimated the number of AI clicks by comparing the amount of total clicks that were generated by the website during the 28-day period that it was opted out of Google’s AI features to the amount of total clicks that were generated during the next 28 days once the site was opted back in. He compared those results using the same searches and position rankings in each to limit the effects of position and search query changes.
Google counts clicks on an AI Overview or AI Mode link as a standard click within Search Console’s Performance report. Neither the help page for the generative AI performance report nor Google’s help documentation for the Performance report lists any way to separate the clicks made on links in Google’s AI features from all other web-based clicks, as I mentioned on Nov. 2.
His comparison of the two periods came to an estimated click-through rate of about 0.9% for Zyppy’s AI Overview and AI Mode impressions, and he considers 0.7% to 1.1% a reasonable range. Across Google Search as a whole, the site averages a click-through rate of around 0.4%.
With AI features making up about 10% of the site’s search impressions and drawing clicks at that higher rate, he estimates they produced about 21% of its search clicks. He says Zyppy has done a fair amount of work optimizing the site to win AI citations, which may be why so many of its clicks came from AI features.
Shepard Also Estimates A Lift For Regular Listings
Shepard says the site’s organic results received higher click-through rates (CTR) once it appeared in the AI Overview section of search engine results pages. He described this impact on CTR as small, with the effects greatest on those URLs receiving the most AI visibility.
He calls it a halo effect, an advertising term for when people who see a site listed several times on one results page are more likely to click at least one of them. He wrote that nobody knows for sure why, and that brand reinforcement is a likely explanation.
When he added the additional clicks on his regular organic listings, he estimated that 23% of all search clicks to the site were tied to AI features.
For now, Zyppy will keep the site opted in. In his view, staying in AI search and working toward AI citations seems like “the only reasonable action to take.”
Why This Matters
After Google started letting some UK sites use the Search Console opt-out in June, I wrote that if a website opted out prior to viewing their AI visibility data, they might give up potential traffic that they could not yet measure. Shepard’s test gives an example of how much traffic is estimated to be at issue and also counts clicks on standard listings as well as those from AI links.
The generative AI performance report shows how many of your search impressions come from AI Overviews and AI Mode. On Zyppy’s site, those impressions were about 10% of the total, while Shepard’s estimate of their share of clicks came to about 21%. He says other sites could come in higher or lower.
Looking Ahead
The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority gives Google until Dec. 3 to provide publishers with impressions, clicks, and click-through rate for AI search features, according to a summary of its rules. The CMA’s summary lists the metrics as aggregated across features such as AI Overviews and AI Mode. The rules cover AI features shown to people in the UK, and Google has three more months after Dec. 3 to roll out page-level controls for AI search features.
Clicks and click-through rate for AI features are the numbers Shepard had to estimate.
Featured Image: Tetiana Yurchenko/Shutterstock
