AEO in 2027: how to be the answer when nobody clicks

Pew Research watched how 900 US adults actually used Google in March 2025. The result is the clearest picture we have of the behaviour.

Roughly half the clicks, gone. And almost nobody clicked the sources listed inside the summary.

Ahrefs found the same pattern from the other side. Comparing 300,000 keywords, it reported in February 2026 that an AI Overview is associated with a 58% lower click-through rate for the top-ranking page. Its earlier 2025 analysis had put that figure at 34.5%, so the effect appears to be getting stronger.

This next finding is the one that should change how you brief your content team. Seer Interactive compared organic click-through rates on queries with and without an AI Overview, and split the results by whether the brand was cited in the overview.

You lose clicks either way. But the brands named in the overview kept about a third more of them than the brands left out. Being the source is the new position one.

Semrush looked at the same keywords before and after AI Overviews began appearing on them, and found the zero-click rate actually fell slightly, from 33.75% to 31.53%. Its conclusion was that AI Overviews do not automatically increase zero-click behaviour.

How can that sit next to the Pew and Ahrefs numbers? Different methods, different keyword sets, and different definitions of a click. Our reading is that the effect is real but uneven: heavy on simple informational questions, lighter on commercial ones where people still want to compare options themselves.

That is useful, because it tells you where to spend effort.

Less often than the panic suggests, and it moves around. Semrush tracked more than 10 million keywords through 2025.

A jump to nearly a quarter of queries in summer, then a pullback. Google is clearly still tuning when to show them. Plan for a meaningful minority of your keywords to carry an AI answer, concentrated in how-to and definition questions, and expect that share to keep shifting.

None of this needs exotic tactics. The pages that get quoted tend to share a few plain habits.

Answer first. Put a direct, two or three sentence answer straight under the heading that asks the question. Then explain. People skim and so do machines.

One question per section. Use the real wording your customers use as the heading. "How much does X cost in India?" beats "Pricing considerations".

Show your working. Numbers with their source and date, named authors, a last-reviewed date. Pew found that government sites made up 6% of sources in AI summaries against 2% of ordinary results, which tells you what kind of source gets trusted.

Mark it up. FAQ, HowTo, Product and LocalBusiness structured data do not guarantee anything, but they remove ambiguity about what the page is.

Keep it current. A stale answer is the easiest one to replace.

If the answer is read on Google's page, your analytics will not show a visit. So add three numbers to your monthly report.

First, how many of your priority questions show an AI answer, and whether you are cited in it. Check a fixed list of 20 to 40 questions on the same day each month.

Second, branded search volume. People who read your name in an answer often search for you directly later.

Third, the quality of the visits you do get. Fewer clicks from better-informed people can be worth more than the old number. Judge it by enquiries, not sessions.