AI Overviews materially changed click-through behaviour in Google search starting in 2024–2025, and the impact has now stabilized into measurable patterns. Average click-through rate impact varies substantially by query type and site type. **The general pattern across Canadian sites:** **Informational queries.** Largest impact. Queries like 'what is X,' 'how does Y work,' 'when should I do Z' — the AI Overview directly answers, and click-through to cited sources drops 30–50% on average. Sites whose business model depends on informational long-tail traffic (publishers, content marketing programs, knowledge bases) feel this most acutely. **Commercial investigation queries.** Moderate impact. Queries like 'best X for Y' or 'X vs Y comparison' often trigger AI Overviews that synthesize comparison information. Click-through drops 15–25% on average. Sites whose content was the cited source within the AI Overview see the smallest drops; sites whose content was passed over in the synthesis see larger drops. **Transactional queries.** Smallest impact. Queries like 'buy X,' 'X near me,' 'X in Ottawa' rarely trigger AI Overviews because Google's models recognize purchase intent and surface classical commercial results instead. Click-through changes minimally for transactional queries. **Local queries.** Variable impact. Queries triggering local pack results often don't trigger AI Overviews. Queries triggering AI Overviews about local topics (e.g., 'best neighbourhoods to live in Ottawa') see meaningful click-through reduction. **Brand queries.** Minimal impact. Queries containing your brand name almost always surface your site prominently regardless of AI Overview presence. **The asymmetry that determines outcomes for individual sites:** Sites whose content is consistently cited within AI Overviews can offset much of the click-through loss through compound brand visibility — users who see your brand cited but don't click still build awareness, which produces direct and branded search traffic over time. Sites whose content is rarely cited absorb the click-through loss without offsetting brand visibility benefit, producing the worst outcome. **Practical adaptation for Canadian businesses:** **Optimize for AI Overview citation** (structured directness, named expertise, schema, original data, AI crawler access) so that when an AI Overview appears for your priority queries, your site is the cited source. **Diversify traffic sources.** Sites overly dependent on Google organic informational traffic should consciously build other channels (newsletter, podcast, paid acquisition, partnerships, social) so that any future AI Overview expansion has less disproportionate impact. **Shift content focus where appropriate.** For some content types (basic informational content), the ROI on production has dropped significantly because AI Overviews now answer those queries directly. Content investment may shift toward content types where AI Overviews don't dominate (in-depth analysis, original research, transactional/commercial content, local-context content). **Track AI Overview impact specifically.** Use Google Search Console's AI Overview impression data to identify queries where AI Overviews appear and track click-through trends over time. The data reveals which content investments are most affected and where adaptation is most urgent. For most Canadian small and mid-market businesses, the net impact of AI Overviews has been a 10–20% reduction in informational organic traffic, partially offset by branded traffic growth from increased AI surface visibility. Programs that have actively optimized for AI Overview citation have sometimes offset the loss entirely.