The data on AI Overview impact that Google has been careful not to provide has been assembled, with growing precision, by the agencies and analytics platforms that manage search programmes at scale. The consensus figure — that AI Overviews have reduced click-through rates on affected queries by between twelve and eighteen per cent — masks a distribution that is far more consequential for specific categories of brand than the aggregate implies.

Informational queries — how something works, what something is, how to evaluate a category of product — have experienced the most severe displacement. These are precisely the queries that sit at the top of the purchase funnel, the queries that brands have historically used to introduce themselves to prospective customers at the moment of category consideration. When an AI Overview answers the question completely, the incentive to click through to a source is substantially reduced. The brand that used to own the first page result for "how to choose a marketing automation platform" now receives a fraction of the traffic that position once delivered, because the question is being answered before the results appear.

The implications for brand strategy extend beyond search budgets. The queries that drove upper-funnel traffic were often the most important mechanism by which brands established authority in the minds of early-stage buyers. Losing that traffic does not merely reduce visitor counts; it removes a touchpoint that shaped purchase consideration before intent was fully formed.