Here's a stat that should reshape how every online store thinks about SEO right now: AI Overviews now appear on roughly 65% of commercial search queries.
The traffic impact isn't even across the board, though — and that unevenness is the actual insight.
Informational and category-level queries are getting hit hardest, with organic click-through rates down 28-34% on informational searches and 12-19% on mid-funnel category pages. That's a huge share of the traffic that used to feed top-of-funnel discovery.
But product detail pages? Less than 5% CTR change. Google Shopping clicks are holding steady, or even growing slightly.
Read that gap carefully. It tells you exactly where to put your effort right now.
If your store's SEO strategy is still mostly blog posts and category page optimization, that's precisely the layer being suppressed by AI Overviews. Meanwhile, the actual product pages — the ones closest to a purchase decision — are still earning clicks largely undisturbed.
WHAT THIS ACTUALLY MEANS FOR E-COMMERCE SEO IN 2026
- Product schema markup matters more than ever, since the Shopping Graph now connects tens of billions of listings in real time, tracking price and availability directly
- Category and blog content still has value, but expect its click-through ceiling to keep dropping as AI Overviews absorb more of that traffic
- Technical basics (structured data, image optimization, page speed) increasingly separate stores that show up in the Shopping tab from ones that don't
This is exactly the gap most general SEO advice misses — because it's not written specifically for stores with thousands of SKUs, filtered category pages, and product-specific schema requirements.
If you're running an online store and haven't audited your product page technical setup recently, this is a good moment to.