Simulator · Free, no signup
AI Overview traffic impact simulator
Estimate how much of your organic traffic sits in the blast radius of Google's AI Overviews, and what it is worth.
Not all your traffic is exposed. AI Overviews trigger overwhelmingly on informational queries, so navigational, transactional and local clicks are largely untouched. This simulator separates the exposed share from the safe share and applies the published 34.5% click reduction to the part that is at risk.
The tool
Your results appear here as soon as you change a value.
How to use it
- Pull your real click total Search Console, last full month, organic only.
- Estimate your informational share Sort your queries by type. Anything starting with how, what, why, best or vs is informational. Brand and product queries are not.
- Sample your AI Overview coverage Take your top 50 queries and check how many trigger an AI Overview today. That percentage is more accurate than any published average.
- Act on the exposed share, not the total The output tells you which part of your traffic needs a different strategy: content that earns the citation, or queries an AI summary cannot satisfy.
How the numbers work
Everything here runs in JavaScript in your browser. No input is sent anywhere, nothing is stored, and there is no account, no email gate and no export limit. The maths is deliberately simple so you can check it: where a benchmark is used, the source is named on the page rather than hidden behind a "based on industry data" claim.
Where this calculator uses published research, it uses these: the position-CTR meta-analysis from First Page Sage (updated May 2025), the 34.5% AI Overview click reduction measured by Ahrefs across 300,000 keywords, and Pew Research Center's click-behaviour study. Tool prices come from vendor pricing pages read on 2 August 2026. All of them are averages, and averages are a starting point, not a forecast: your own Search Console data beats every benchmark on this page.
Frequently asked questions
How much traffic do AI Overviews actually cost?
Ahrefs measured a 34.5% lower click-through rate for the top-ranking page when an AI Overview is present, across 300,000 keywords. Pew Research found only about 8% of visits to a results page with an AI summary produced a click to any source, against about 15% without one. Both are averages across informational queries.
Which queries are safe from AI Overviews?
Navigational, transactional, local and anything requiring your specific data. A summary cannot tell someone your prices, your availability or your opening hours, so those clicks still come to you.
Should I stop publishing informational content?
No, but the goal changes. Informational content now earns citations and brand presence more reliably than clicks. Judge it on whether you are the source the answer names, not only on sessions.
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Last verified 2 August 2026. Prices, plans and features on this page were read on each vendor's own site on that date. Vendors change pricing often, so confirm before you buy. Spotted an error? Tell us and we will fix it.