Until 11 September, Google's AI Overviews almost never linked out from inside the answer itself. Nine days later, in Peec AI's tracking, more than a quarter of them did.
Peec AI is an AI search analytics company. The chart Malte Landwehr shared on 21 September tracks the share of AI Overviews carrying an external link inside the answer text: close to 0% through late August and early September, then a jump from 11 September to 26.2% by 20 September. Search Engine Roundtable and Search Engine Watch reported it on 23 September. It is one company's tracking, Peec hasn't said which markets the chart covers, and Google hasn't commented. But it is the change Google signalled in May, when it said its AI answers would show more links "right next to the relevant text".
Most of the coverage has treated this as an SEO story. I think it's a revenue story.
Why this is a revenue event, not a technical update
A link inside an AI answer isn't like a link on a page of results. By the time someone sees it, the shortlisting is done. They asked a question, the answer named a business, and the link sits beside the sentence recommending it. The visitor who clicks arrives with the decision half made.
That changes what a search position is worth. Seer Interactive tracked 2.43 billion organic impressions across 53 brands. On informational searches in 2025, a brand cited in the AI Overview earned about 20,743 organic clicks per million impressions. A brand that wasn't cited earned about 9,445, less than half as many.
Ranking first no longer protects you on its own. Ahrefs studied 300,000 keywords and found that an AI Overview now correlates with a 58% lower average click-through rate for the page ranked first. And most searches that show an AI Overview end without a click at all: Similarweb put the median zero-click rate at around 80% for those searches, against about 60% for searches without one.
Not every new link leaves Google, either. In the same week, Search Engine Roundtable reported Google testing links in AI Overviews that open AI Mode instead of a website.
Put that together and the logic is simple. Fewer clicks leave Google, and the ones that do go disproportionately to the businesses the answer cites. The revenue follows the link.
What is each lost enquiry worth?
Every enquiry has a price. In Australia, a family law firm pays about A$210 for each enquiry it buys from Google search (PixelRush, three firms' Google Ads accounts, 12 months to September 2026). An allied health clinic pays a median of A$107 per new-patient enquiry from Google Ads (Clinic Mastery Marketing, July 2026). When an AI answer sends an enquiry to a competitor, that is roughly what it costs you to buy it back.
Over a year, it compounds. The businesses the answers trust collect enquiries they don't pay for. Everyone else pays for theirs, or goes without.
Australia, the US and the UK: the same shift at different stages
AI Overviews reached the US on 14 May 2024, the UK on 15 August 2024 and Australia on 29 October 2024. They now appear almost everywhere buyers look. In Peec AI's tracking of 500,000 business prompts with clear buying intent in April 2026, an AI Overview appeared on 91.7% in the UK, 91.4% in the US and 86.5% in Australia. Comscore's panel shows Google desktop searches with an AI Overview growing from 25.8% in July 2025 to 39.4% in June 2026.
The United States has the longest record. Pew Research tracked the browsing of 900 US adults in March 2025. When a Google AI summary appeared, they clicked a traditional search result on 8% of visits, against 15% when none appeared.
The United Kingdom has the clearest evidence of what happens to clicks, because UK publishers took it to the regulator. DMG Media told the Competition and Markets Authority that desktop click-through to the Daily Mail fell from 25.23% to 2.79% when an AI Overview appeared above a visible Daily Mail link, a drop of 89%, with mobile down 87% (Authoritas data, June to July 2025). An Association of Online Publishers study of eight UK publishing groups found Google search traffic to consumer and B2B sites falling about 18% a quarter, and to news sites about 5%, while sports, travel and health grew by 37%, 22% and 7%. The shift creates winners as well as losers. In June the CMA required Google to make sure publisher content is "properly attributed, using clear links" in AI-generated search results.
Australia is earlier in the shift, and that is the opportunity. Even before AI Overviews arrived, an ACCC analysis of Similarweb data found that 43% of searches for Australia's 1,000 most popular queries ended without a click (August 2023 to July 2024). For Australian businesses, the window for early-mover advantage is open, and it is narrowing.
The dashboard blindness problem
Most businesses can't see any of this happening. ChatGPT tags the links it sends with utm_source=chatgpt.com, so those visits can show up in Google Analytics. Clicks from AI Overviews arrive looking like ordinary Google search traffic, and Search Console doesn't separate AI Overviews from the rest of search. A business can watch stable traffic on its dashboards while revenue quietly moves to the competitors the answers prefer.
The fix is to count at the door. Record where every enquiry came from, on the form, the phone line and the booking system, and ask every new customer how they found you.
What our clients' results show
The biggest outcome we can show is one client's: $6 million in new revenue over the three years to August 2026, recorded in the client's own sales system. It is revenue they can trace back to customers who went looking for an answer and got their name. Their name is withheld at their request.
It can move quickly, too. A US neurosurgery practice started with us on 30 March 2026, ranking on page four of Google. In just under three months it became the practice ChatGPT names first when people ask who to trust with a brain aneurysm or a second opinion. On 28 June 2026 our monitoring caught ChatGPT sending a real visitor to the site, and Google's AI Overview cited the same page the same day. Its monthly Google search impressions went from 152 the month before launch to 2,393 in its first full month, and 2,506 by July.
The full figures, with their sources, are on our results page.
Industries with the most at stake
The industries with the most to win or lose are the ones where buying decisions are trust based, and where an AI recommendation carries real weight over which business receives the first enquiry: professional services including legal and accounting firms, healthcare and specialist medical practices, trades and home services, financial advisory firms, marketing and digital agencies, and hospitality and tourism operators.
What leaders should do now
The 11 September change rewards businesses that have already done the structural work to be cited by AI search. For those that haven't started, the urgency went up this month.
- Answer the questions your ideal clients are asking AI engines, directly, on your own site.
- Build entity authority, so AI engines recognise your business as a credible and trusted source in your category.
- Make sure AI crawlers can reach your website.
- Monitor where you appear: cited in Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity, and mentioned in Gemini and Claude.
- Count enquiries at the door, by source, so you can see what AI search is sending you.
- Capture every enquiry AI sends you with an always-on AI agent that responds immediately, whatever the time.
Brain Buddy AI manages all of this end to end for businesses in Australia and the United States, and works with partner agencies that offer it to their own clients. To see where you stand today, run the free AI visibility audit.
Sources
- Peec AI chart, "External links in AI Overviews rise to 26%", shared by Malte Landwehr on X, 21 September 2026.
- Search Engine Roundtable, Google AI Overviews With Way More External Links; Report, 23 September 2026.
- Search Engine Watch, Google AI Overview now showing more external links within content, 23 September 2026.
- Search Engine Roundtable, Google AI Overview Links Taking You To AI Mode Over Web Pages, 22 September 2026.
- Google, 5 new ways to explore the web with generative AI in Search, 6 May 2026.
- Google, AI Overviews launches: United States, 14 May 2024; United Kingdom, 15 August 2024; Australia, 29 October 2024.
- Peec AI, analysis of 500,000 business prompts, 24 September 2026 (data from 13 to 20 April 2026).
- Seer Interactive, AIO Impact on Google CTR: 2026 Update, 24 April 2026.
- Ahrefs, Update: AI Overviews Reduce Clicks by 58%, 4 February 2026.
- Similarweb, Zero-Click Searches And How They Impact Traffic, 22 May 2025 (archived copy).
- Pew Research Center, Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results, 22 July 2025.
- Comscore, Q2 2026 AI Intelligence Report release, 22 September 2026.
- DMG Media, response to the CMA's proposed decision on Google search, August 2025.
- Association of Online Publishers, Artificial Intelligence Publisher Impact Study, as reported in Press Gazette, 20 July 2026.
- Competition and Markets Authority, CMA secures fairer deal for publishers and improves Google search services in UK, 3 June 2026.
- ACCC, Digital platform services inquiry, interim report 9: revisiting general search services, 2024.
- PixelRush, Law Firm Cost per Lead in Australia: 2026 Benchmarks.
- Clinic Mastery Marketing, Clinic Google Ads Cost Benchmarks 2026.
- Client figures come from the clients' own Google Search Console and sales records. Details are on our results page.
