You have probably heard about how AI overviews are causing a collapse in organic traffic to websites. It’s been coined as the great decoupling and it is a name that has stuck.
Marketers on both sides of the Atlantic have spotted this paradox in their analytics: where impressions are rising while clicks fall away.
The culprit is a new generation of AI-powered search experiences, Google’s AI Overviews, that satisfy many queries without sending users to a website.
For senior brand and marketing leaders, this “great decoupling” is no glitch, and for some it is an existential crisis.
However it is not all doom and gloom, there are some green shoots, it signals that PR, not just SEO, now drives visibility and engagement in brands and their content online.
Why clicks are down even as impressions rise
There are a few studies on this already. BrightEdge’s year-long study of the Search Generative Experience shows search impressions up 49 % year-on-year, while average organic click-through rate (CTR) has fallen 30 % (May 2024 vs May 2025).¹
The drivers are structural:
| Factor | What’s changed | Evidence |
| AI Overviews & featured snippets | Answers appear directly in the results page, displacing traditional organic links.\ | BrightEdge “AI Overviews One-Year Review”, 2025.¹ |
| Zero-click behaviour | ≈ 59 % of Google searches in the US and EU end without a click. | SparkToro/Semrush click-stream study, 2024.² |
This divergence, often shown in Search Console as the now-famous “crocodile graph”, where the new gap between impressions and clicks looks like a yawning crocodile, is not limited to search, it has been happening in social for a while were visibility is increasing but engagement is falling, but that is another story for another time.
Sector-by-sector impact
Let’s look at the detail. We undertook a piece of search and social listening to look for publicly available case studies and found 110 articles, blogs or mentions on social media disclosing relevant information.
We found that impressions vs clicks gap is not uniform. Some industries are seeing a dramatic collapse in CTR, while others remain relatively insulated.
According to Investigating the Impressions–Clicks Gap in Earned and Social Media, the degree of decoupling depends heavily on how AI Overviews and SERP features interact with sector-specific queries.
Education and healthcare are the most heavily disrupted. AI answers now appear in around 87% of queries in both sectors, up from less than 20% the year before.
Users searching for definitions, symptoms or course information are typically satisfied by in-SERP summaries, resulting in sharply reduced click-through rates.
These sectors have become textbook examples of what happens when information-rich queries meet highly optimised AI response panels.
Retail and e-commerce, by contrast, have seen a reversal. AI answers dropped from 29% of queries to just 4%, as Google pulled back AI-generated content in favour of Shopping listings and paid placements. Isn’t that strange that Google is not penalising its own advertising model by serving AI summaries over them!
The result? CTR in this sector has remained stable or even improved, as users still need to click through to view, compare, or purchase products
B2B tech sits in a nuanced middle ground. AI coverage rose from 36% to 70%, dramatically inflating visibility, particularly for long-tail queries. But clicks have not followed suit.
Most impressions occur on informational content, not high-conversion landing pages. The few users who do click tend to be later in the funnel, researchers, buyers, or evaluators who are more likely to convert, even if they are fewer in number.
Other notable examples include:
- Finance and insurance – impressions are up, but much of the traffic is absorbed by AI summaries explaining rates, terms, and comparisons. Brands like MoneySuperMarket, Confused.com, HSBC risk being bypassed in comparison and rate queries.
- Travel – newly affected in 2025, with itinerary-style AI answers displacing guide-style content, but booking-related queries still drive traffic. TripAdvisor and Kayak lose clicks when AI itineraries appear; they’ve shifted marketing strategies accordingly.
- Media and publishing – heavily hit, with traffic from platforms like Facebook halving year-on-year, and now AI summarisation replacing article clicks. It is a disaster for media publishers.
Ironically, penalising the creators of the content that is used for a lot of the training data on earlier models. MailOnline, People.com, BuzzFeed suffer dramatically higher zero-click rates where AI Overviews are shown.
Together, these case studies reveal that the great decoupling is not a universal flattening of digital engagement, it’s a structural reshuffling.
Some sectors must now optimise for visibility without traffic, while others must protect their CTR as AI contracts or expands across query types.
PR content is fuelling AI, yet brands seldom claim the credit
The strategy has to be, if you can’t beat them, join them and go all in on AI. Sure, continue to max out your marketing to benefit while organic search traffic is still available but make plans now for the future, because organic traffic doesn’t look like it is coming back anytime soon and AI use is only going to continue to grow.
PR is having another moment in the sun.
Our own PR Agency One AI Optimisation Study analysed 100 brand-related prompts across ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini:
- 75% of brand references came from PR-shaped earned, shared or owned content.⁴
- 43% of citations pointed to high-authority news or trade outlets (e.g. FT, Wired, The Guardian).⁴
- Social-media debate, especially on LinkedIn, X, Reddit and YouTube, heavily influenced the sentiment LLMs applied to brands.⁴
- Well-structured owned assets (press rooms, FAQs, schema-marked pages) were the third-largest input set.⁴
In short, PR is now the dominant architect of how AI presents brands, yet many teams still track only legacy metrics such as coverage volume or advertising-value-equivalency.
From impressions to impact: a five-step PR playbook
- Audit AI citations
Use ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude to test key category and branded queries. Record which sources appear and which don’t.
Check headline structure, schema markup and crawl speed on pages that fail to surface.
- Secure data-rich coverage in authority outlets
AI values reputable sources. Package exclusive data, charts and commentary for top-tier or niche-expert titles most often cited in your audit.
- Optimise owned content for AI retrieval
- Add clear H-tag hierarchy, FAQ blocks and structured data (FAQPage / NewsArticle).
- Keep press-room assets current and fast-loading.
- An accurate, well-sourced Wikipedia entry is important, but please don’t start trying to manipulate your own page.
- Seed and steer sentiment on social
LLMs ingest platform chatter. Encourage informed, on-brand discussion from executives, partners and ambassadors; respond quickly to correct misconceptions.
- Measure uplift with Search Console + OneEval
Filter for queries that trigger AI Overviews and watch for:
- increased branded-search impressions,
- elevation from secondary to primary citations
- PR Agency One’s OneEval suite links these signals to sales and sign-ups.
What success now looks like
- Presence in AI Overviews (citation share, sentiment, position) is as valuable as a historic #1 ranking.
- Branded-search lift and direct-visit growth are proxy KPIs for latent interest created by zero-click exposure.
- Fewer but higher-intent clicks: BrightEdge notes post-AI visitors convert up to 4× better in some sectors.¹ Although this is a nascent observation and heavily debated / contested!
PR’s remit is no longer just to secure headlines; it must feed the algorithmic bloodstream.
Action checklist (start this quarter)
- Run an AI citation audit across your top 25 brand and category queries.
- Prioritise pitches to media outlets that LLMs cite most often.
- Rebuild the press room with semantic markup, fast UX and evergreen FAQs.
- Activate social ambassadors to shape positive, verifiable discussion.
- Track AI visibility and branded-search volume alongside CTR.
- Report conversion quality, not just traffic volume. (but you should be doing this anyway, right!)
James Crawford
Managing Director at PR Agency One.
Sources
- BrightEdge, AI Overviews: One-Year Review, May 2025.
- SparkToro/Semrush, Zero-Click Search Study, July 2024.
- Socialinsider, Social Media Benchmarks 2025, February 2025.
- PR Agency One, How Brands Can Dominate the Battle for Visibility in AI with PR, 2025.
All figures above are drawn verbatim from the cited studies. No other statistics have been introduced.
