Do AI answers still send visitors to a studio's website?

Fewer people click when Google shows an AI summary. Pew found that users clicked a result in 8 percent of visits with a summary and in 15 percent without one, and Ahrefs measured 58 percent fewer clicks on the top result. Pages the summary cites do better than pages it leaves out, so being cited matters as much as ranking.

For a studio that lives on a handful of good enquiries a year, the traffic figure is only part of the story. The rest of this piece goes through the numbers, then what they mean for a business like yours.

How often does Google show an AI summary?

On a large share of searches, and the share moves. Pew Research Center found that "around one-in-five Google searches in March 2025 produced an AI summary"¹, 18 percent of all the searches in its study.

Semrush's study covers more than 10 million keywords in the US. In the AI Overviews study², AI Overviews appeared for 6.49 percent of queries in January 2025. The share peaked at 24.61 percent in July 2025 and was 15.69 percent in November 2025. Google changes how often it shows them, so treat any single figure as a snapshot.

The same thing is happening in Dutch. Google announced AI Overviews in Dutch³, and on 8 October 2025 it wrote that "de AI-modus komt naar Google Zoeken in Nederland"⁴, in 35 new languages including Dutch.

How many clicks does the summary take?

A lot of them. In Pew's study of 900 US adults and 68,879 searches, people clicked a traditional search result in 8 percent of visits when a summary appeared, and in 15 percent when it did not. They clicked a link inside the summary in just 1 percent of visits.

Ahrefs measured the effect on the page in first place. With March 2025 data, an AI Overview went with a 34.5 percent lower click-through rate⁵ for the top-ranking page. When Ahrefs repeated the study with December 2025 data, the figure was 58 percent⁶.

Seer Interactive followed 3,119 informational queries across 42 organizations. For queries with an AI Overview, organic click-through fell 61 percent⁷, from 1.76 percent in June 2024 to 0.61 percent in September 2025. Clicks on paid ads fell 68 percent. So the ads on those queries lost clicks as well.

Do cited pages get more of the clicks that are left?

Yes, in the data we have. In the same September 2025 update, Seer found that brands cited in AI Overviews had 35 percent higher organic click-through and 91 percent higher paid click-through than brands that were not cited.

Seer's April 2026 update⁸ covered 53 brands and 5.47 million queries from January 2025 to February 2026. Cited brands got "120% more organic clicks per impression" than uncited brands on the same results page. On informational queries, a cited brand's click-through was 2.07 percent, an uncited brand's was 0.94 percent, and a result on a page with no AI Overview got 3.35 percent.

Being cited wins back part of what the summary takes, but not all of it. The difference between cited and uncited is large enough that it is worth working for.

How can you see your own AI impressions and citations?

Two free reports show it from the search engines' side. Google Search Console has a Generative AI performance report⁹. It counts impressions, meaning "how many times links to your site were shown to a user in a generative AI feature on Google Search", for AI Overviews and AI Mode. You can group them by page, country, date or device. It does not show the queries or the clicks.

Bing Webmaster Tools has an AI Performance report¹⁰, in public preview since February 2026. It counts how often your pages were cited as sources in Microsoft Copilot, Bing's AI summaries and some partner services. It also lists the grounding queries, which Bing describes as "the key phrases the AI used when retrieving content".

Neither report tells you what ChatGPT or Perplexity say about you. For that, ask the assistants the questions your clients would ask, once a month, and note whether you are cited, mentioned or absent. How we do that work is on the generative engine optimization page.

What does this mean for a studio that sells on enquiries, not traffic?

It means the number to watch is enquiries, and where they came from. A studio that books a few commissions a month does not need thousands of visitors. It needs the right buyer to see its name in the answer and then go and check.

People do check. In BrightLocal's 2026 survey of 1,002 US adults, 45 percent of consumers used AI tools for local business recommendations¹¹, up from 6 percent the year before. The same survey found that 88 percent of AI users fact-check the sources the AI tools cite. A buyer who opens your site after reading your name in an answer already knows what you do and why you were named.

Many of those visits will not show up as clicks from ChatGPT in your analytics, because people can read the answer and then type your name into Google or into the address bar. So add a question to your enquiry form asking how the person found you, and include "an AI assistant, such as ChatGPT" as one of the choices. After a few months you will know how much of your work starts in an answer.

The site they land on has to do the rest. It should show the work straight away and make it easy to get in touch. The web design for interior designers page shows how we build that first screen. How this work relates to classic search is on the SEO for interior designers page.

What does fioel do here?

We work to get studios cited in the answers their clients read, and we measure it with the reports above, as part of generative engine optimization.