It seems fewer visitors come from Google, and it is not clear what to do. People often blame “AI in search”: the short AI-written overview that Google shows above the regular results (called AI Overviews). Below are five numbers from studies and from Google itself, both sides of the argument, and what you can check on your own in half an hour. We checked the facts against the original sources on October 27, 2026; the year of each study is given next to its number.
First, the limits. Pew Research is the USA. Ahrefs and Seer Interactive do not say which countries their data comes from (Ahrefs used only the desktop version of search). We found no Ukrainian figures of this quality, so treat these numbers as a reference point, not as a verdict on your site.
1. It is already in Ukraine, and in Ukrainian
On May 20, 2025, Google wrote on its blog that it was expanding AI Overviews to more than 200 countries and territories and more than 40 languages. The post does not name Ukraine separately. But in the Ukrainian version of Google’s AI Overviews help page, Ukraine is on the list of countries and Ukrainian is on the list of languages (checked on October 27, 2026). The same goes for “AI Mode”, a separate conversation with AI inside search: according to Google’s help, it is available in Ukraine in Ukrainian. You can open it at google.com/ai or with the “AI Mode” button in search.
When exactly AI Mode started speaking Ukrainian, we did not find. According to press reports, in August 2025 it launched in Ukraine in English only.
What to do: on your phone, type “how to choose [your product or service]” and “[service] [your city]”. See whether an AI overview appears at the top and whether your site is among its links. It takes two minutes, and afterwards you see what your customers see.
2. 8% versus 15%
The Pew Research Center study (published July 22, 2025) followed the searches of 900 American adults in March 2025, 68,879 searches in total. An AI overview appeared in 18% of them. When there was an overview, people clicked a regular result link in 8% of visits. When there was none, in 15%, almost twice as often. Links inside the overview itself were clicked in just 1% of visits. The overview appeared most often on questions starting with “who/what/when/why”: in 60% of such queries.
The Ahrefs study (updated February 4, 2026) looked at 300,000 queries in Google Search Console, comparing December 2023 with December 2025 (desktop only). Where an AI overview is present, the first result gets on average a 58% lower click-through rate. For second place, minus 50.8%; for tenth, minus 19.4%. We covered the same numbers in the article Google Rankings Are a Poor Metric: a position in the list pays nothing by itself.
What to do: if fewer visitors come from Google, do not rush to rebuild your site. Compare leads and calls with the same months last year: seasonality can explain more than AI.
3. And Google says: not fewer clicks
On August 6, 2025, Google published a blog post about clicks. It says that total organic click volume from search to websites is “relatively stable” year over year, and that “quality” clicks (where the person does not quickly go back to search) are slightly up. Google also writes that some sites get less traffic and some get more. The post contains no numbers. The same appears in Google’s documentation for site owners (updated December 10, 2025): clicks from AI overviews are “higher quality”, meaning people stay on the site longer.
Here is the contradiction. Studies show a drop in clicks on particular queries; Google talks about the overall picture and gives no numbers. Both can be right at once: the overview “takes” clicks on some queries while total traffic holds up through others. Whom to believe, you will only learn from your own data.
What to do: in Google Analytics open “Reports” → “Acquisition” → “Traffic acquisition” and find the “Organic Search” row. Compare with last year, including “Key events”: the actions you marked as important, such as a lead, a form or a call. This works only if leads on your site are set up as key events.
4. The impression is there, the click is not
Seer Interactive (study of April 24, 2026; 53 brands, 5.47 million queries, 2.43 billion organic impressions) looked at brands that AI named as a source in its overview. From September to October 2025 their impressions grew from 15.8 to 33.1 million while clicks stayed put: 398,798 in September and 400,271 in October. In other words, you are seen in the AI answer twice as often, and clicked just as often as before.
Seer itself does not say exactly why. The authors name two possibilities: brands got into overviews on more queries (thanks to new content or better SEO), or Google changed how the overview picks sources. In November 2025 these brands’ clicks fell to 301,783, so we use September and October only.
But do not conclude it is worth zero: a person could remember the name and call later. That thought is our interpretation, not Seer’s conclusion.
What to do: ask every new customer: “How did you hear about us?” Write down “From Google” and “AI recommended you” separately. It is free, and it is the only way to see AI’s effect on calls.
5. Named as a source: 120% more clicks
From the same Seer study. When AI names a brand as a source in its answer, each impression brings 120% more organic clicks than when it does not. For informational queries such a brand still trails queries without an overview by 38%. And for queries that had an overview but did not name the brand, the click-through rate fell by 67% over 2025.
The authors state plainly that this is a link, not a proven cause: stronger brands are cited more often, so part of the effect is simply authority. One more detail in Google’s favor: according to Seer, the 2025 CTR decline did not continue into 2026. In January and February 2026, organic CTR on queries with an overview rose from 1.31% (December 2025) to 2.36% (February 2026).
What to do: Search Console (Google’s free service that shows how your site appears in search) has a “Generative AI performance” report. It shows which of your pages appeared in AI answers. According to Google’s help, since August 31, 2026 it has been available to all sites. Path: “All reports and tools” → “Performance reports” → this report. It shows only impressions, no clicks, so draw conclusions carefully.
Two more things from colleagues’ practice
According to practitioners’ reviews (we have no primary source with numbers): you can check by hand whether AI names you. Take 10 to 20 queries people should find you with, put them to ChatGPT, Gemini and Google, and write down whether your name is in the answer. Repeat monthly. In Google Analytics the same practitioners suggest looking at traffic sources: visits from sites like chatgpt.com also show that people arrive from AI answers. More on checking yourself in ChatGPT is in the article What ChatGPT Says About Your Business.
From our practice
When a client says “fewer clicks”, we first look not at search but at leads: whether their number changed against the same period last year and from which channels they come. Often it turns out there are fewer clicks but the same number of inquiries, because visitors became more targeted. Sometimes the opposite. Without this comparison, any number about AI remains a number about other people’s sites. What exactly your ads count as a lead, we covered in a separate article.
Summary
- AI Overviews and AI Mode are already available in Ukraine, in Ukrainian too (Google help, 2026).
- Studies show fewer clicks with an overview (Pew, USA, 2025: 8% vs 15%; Ahrefs, 2026: minus 58% for the first result).
- Google says total clicks are stable and quality is higher, but gives no numbers (Google blog, August 2025).
- Impressions in AI answers grow faster than clicks (Seer, 2026), but a causal link is not proven, and in 2026 the CTR decline, per Seer, stopped.
- Check your own: leads against last year, the answer to “how did you hear about us”, the Search Console AI report.
How we look at ads and leads is in the Google Ads for business section.
Want a free audit of your Google Ads? Send us a request — we will look at your account, tell you what counts as a lead there and where the calls come from.