Being cited in an AI summary: what the study really says
Being cited in an AI summary brings 35% more organic clicks and 91% more paid clicks than being absent from it. Both figures are accurate. The study that produces them contains a third one, almost never repeated: a page on a query with no AI summary gets more than double the click-through rate of a page cited in a summary.
Both figures come from Seer Interactive, in an update published in September 2025. The sample is serious: 3,119 search terms, 42 organizations, 25.1 million organic impressions, over a period running from June 2024 to September 2025.
What the study measures is click-through rates, not click volumes. The nuance matters, because a rate can go up while the number of clicks goes down, and that is exactly what happens here.
The three values for the third quarter of 2025
Here are the three situations the study distinguishes, with their organic click-through rate and their change over one year.
| Situation of the query | Organic click-through rate | Change over one year |
|---|---|---|
| No AI summary is triggered | 1.45% | down 46.2% |
| AI summary triggered, page cited in it | 0.70% | down 49.4% |
| AI summary triggered, page not cited | 0.52% | down 65.2% |
The ratio between 0.70% and 0.52% gives exactly the 35% in circulation. So the figure is right, and it compares two situations that have both lost ground. Citation limits the loss rather than reversing it.
The third row deserves to be read on its own. A page present on a query with a summary but absent from the cited sources loses two thirds of its click-through rate in one year. It is the most costly scenario of the three, and it is where most companies that have changed nothing in their content find themselves.
What to conclude for your content
Aiming for citation remains the right reflex when an AI summary is triggered on your queries: 0.70% beats 0.52%, and the gap is widening. The structure that makes content extractable is described in our analysis of the answer-first structure, and it is the first of the five workstreams of a GEO mandate.
The most profitable editorial trade-off lies elsewhere, and it is rarely spelled out. It consists of identifying the queries in your market on which no summary is triggered, and concentrating the effort there. At 1.45% against 0.70%, those queries are worth double, and nobody is fighting over them yet in the name of AI visibility.
Those queries exist in number: vendor evaluation searches, transactional queries and brand searches trigger few summaries, because the decision requires visiting sites. That is also where your buyers are.
The check, one hour
- List the twenty queries that bring you the most inquiries, not the most traffic.
- Run each one in Google and note which ones trigger an AI summary.
- On those that trigger none, the only question is your classic position.
- On those that trigger one, the question becomes whether you are among the sources.
A proposal that promises citation in AI summaries without distinguishing these two groups of queries is selling an objective in place of a result.
Deciding where to concentrate the editorial effort on your real queries is the kind of trade-off a 90-minute consultation settles.
All three groups in the study lose traffic year over year. No citation strategy reverses that trend: it limits its effect on the queries where the summary appears.
The measured effect of generated summaries on traffic is detailed in our analysis of AI summaries and the traffic decline, and the exact scope of the figures in circulation in our record of verified search statistics.
- Seer Interactive, AIO impact on Google CTR, September 2025 update, 3,119 search terms, 42 organizations, 25.1 million organic impressions, from June 2024 to September 2025.
Geneviève puts the strategy for your engagement into action. She leads all our web development projects: Shopify, WordPress and the new ways of building a site with AI. She manages our team of developers and translates your business needs into technical language. She runs your organic search (SEO), your visibility in AI answers (GEO) and your site's conversion rate optimization (CRO). Her work is at the heart of three goals: Attract customers with SEO and AI, Improve your site's conversion, and Strengthen your visibility in AI answers. With Gabriel, she also builds the landing pages for your advertising campaigns. She writes mainly about SEO, AI visibility and web design.
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