@webhivedigital

As we're approaching the end of 2025, there is no doubt that AI has had a huge impact on SEO, and Ahrefs have released a super interesting study that shows exactly what that looks like now. And it's probably not what you think. We're gonna start with the negatives, and probably the most obvious, to be honest, top rankings have lost a third of their clicks.

This means if you're ranking position 1 on Google, and you were before AI overviews were introduced, you have probably noticed a big drop in traffic. And that's because more people are finding the information they wanna see. like this.

This is increasing the amount of zero click searches we're seeing, which is when users are searching, they're finding the information they want on Google, and they're not needing to go somewhere else. This also means that people that are clicking from Google are likely to be more motivated. this is because a lot of the AI overviews answer how-to type searches.

It's not actually people that are looking to buy something What they're looking for is how to do something or just to generally learn more info on the topic. If you were ranking really well and getting a lot of traffic for searches like that, you weren't necessarily monetising or seeing any real profit from it. However, the traffic that you do get from those searches is much more likely to convert into a customer.

Basically, you're gonna get fewer visitors, but they're more likely to convert, which means your traffic is a lot more valuable. So what you wanna actually be looking for is that your conversion rate is going up even if your traffic is going down. These are the metrics that are gonna give you a really good sign of whether your SEO strategy is working as we enter 2026.