Neil Patel discusses how Google's AI Overviews crushed click-through rates: organic CTR dropped from 3.97% to 0.64% when Overviews appeared, and paid CTR fell from 17.27% to 6.56%. For consulting firms, he argues rankings matter less than word-of-mouth and referrals, which close bigger deals.
Google organic versus paid CTR is hitting a new low. Have you seen the article?
No.
The Sears data? So when you look at organic CTRs, when the AI Overviews is not shown, from Jan 2024, it's increased from 2.68 to Jan 2025 of 3.97%, okay? When you look at organic CTR with AI Overviews shown, In January 2024, it was 1.41% to Jan 2025 was 0.64%. So there's a big drop when there's AI overviews. When you look at paid CTRs, when the AI overviews is not shown, it's gone from 23.07% all the way down to 17.27%. And paid CTR when the AI overviews are shown, it's gone from 8.76% all the way down to 6.56%.
Wow. Yeah.
This was for 10,000 informational keywords and they just looked at the top 20 positions. I don't think what data we've seen when you actually look at Google as an aggregate, I don't have on, you know, we probably have it somewhere in our system and we should look it up. But when we look at overall organic traffic, we're actually seeing Google drive more organic traffic than before and more paid traffic. That doesn't mean CTRs are up. It just means when we look at over time, more people are just using Google.
Yep.
Right? So you're able to get more traffic in total, even though the click-through rate is lower. And when you look at keywords, the study was done on informational intent. A lot of these informational intent keywords are not really driving direct conversions.
Yep. And that's, that's why people like HubSpot, for example, are losing all that traffic, but it doesn't matter because it's a lot of irrelevant stuff.
Correct.
Yep.
Like in our industry, for you and I, most organizations get their business from word of mouth, employee referrals, client referrals, RFPs. They're not necessarily in that order, but those are usually the 4 ways to get the most business for a consulting shop.
Yep.
In none of those ways did I say ranking number 1 on Google helps or hurts. I do think it can add more revenue than decline or than hurt you, but it's not going to, Change your business. And the reason I would say that is, when someone goes through the RFP process, it takes them so long to choose a vendor that a lot of times they want to have that contract for multiple years. So it's just more stickier.
You know what's funny? Side note with the RFPs. When we talk to the enterprises, they're just like, dude, procurement with us is going to take forever. The move is you guys go to one of our agencies and slip in through one of the agencies that have gone through procurement already. And that will make it way easier. And so they'll try to find ways around their own organization. Like, it's funny like that. But I mean, look, for us, I don't, I, I see website traffic slowly declining over time, but it's not like drastic declines for us right now. How's it look for you guys?
Uh, aggregate or just our own website?
Your own website.
Our blog or our corporate website?
Your blog.
Blog has been going down, but we've intentionally shifted resources years ago to our corporate site. Corporate site's climbing fast. It has been.
Really? Yeah.
Corporate site's been really cool.
What do you put on the corporate site? You have your webinars there?
Webinars. I don't know what's on our corporate site. I just know the team focuses on it. A lot of press, news. We're adding a stats section on our corporate site that we'll end up pushing. But corporate site's been actually growing really fast. And what we found is wherever we spend our time and resources, we can directionally usually move things up.
Yeah.
The number one reason our blog started going down is years ago we started looking at the pages that drive revenue, like the specific pages on our blog. Then we looked at the keywords that drive traffic to those pages. The pages that get— that generated us the most amount of leads were things like how to generate more traffic from Instagram, how to get more Instagram followers. The pages that drove the most revenue, because we look at what pages are driving leads, and what pages are driving revenue, the leads actually are closing into customers, are really detailed pages like how to do SEO on a blog that's in 10 different languages.
Yep, yep.
And it doesn't drive much traffic, but it drives a ton of revenue. So what we started doing is we started shifting our SEO efforts from the pages that were driving leads to focusing on the pages that were driving leads and those leads that converted into revenue. In essence, we're focusing on the revenue metric more versus the lead metric. Because for organization like ours, we have a massive sales team. Salespeople are expensive.
All right, so I wanted to take a moment to tell you about my podcast co-host Neil's agency called NP Digital. And they work with a whole host of global companies or global organization. Also, Neil has SEO tools such as Ubersuggest and AnswerThePublic. All you have to do is go to npdigital.com/neil to learn more and we'll see you on the other side.
If they're calling and following up with leads that come from an Instagram page on getting tons of Instagram traffic and it never in a year, and we looked at our data literally over a 12-month period, like lead quantity to revenue, some of these pages like that Instagram followers page drove a ton of leads, never one customer. And then we started calculating how much time are sales reps spending following up with the leads trying to close? It was costing us an arm and a leg. When I say arm and a leg, Hundreds of thousands a year. And then when we looked at all the pages, we were spending millions of dollars a year on sales efforts that were driving zero revenue because these pages were just junk. So we're like, you know what, forget these pages, delete some of them, let them wither away, focus and double down on the ones that actually drive revenue. And when we look at our company right now, we generate less leads than we used to by far, by magnitude, right? By I think 1/3.
Yeah.
But when we look at the revenue per lead, it's way more than 3x. So the numbers have panned out for us.
Yeah. All right guys, that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, view, subscribe. Go to marketingschool.io/agency if you want to grow your agency faster, and we'll see you tomorrow.
