If you run Google Ads, the math inside AI Overviews just changed

If you run a service business in Laval or Montreal and you spend money on Google Ads, this post is about a number that changed dramatically over the past two years. It's worth two minutes because it directly affects how much of your ad budget is actually doing anything.

The number: between June 2024 and September 2025, the click-through rate on paid ads inside Google's AI Overviews dropped from 19.7% to 6.34%. That's a 68% decline in fifteen months, on the same kind of search results.

For a small business spending $1,500 to $5,000 a month on Google Ads, that's not a rounding error. That's the math behind your ROI getting worse without anyone telling you why.

What an AI Overview actually is

When you Google something now, you'll often see an AI-written answer at the top of the page before any links. That's the AI Overview. Google generates it, summarizes the answer for you, and then shows the regular search results below. Some queries trigger one. Others don't. The trigger rate keeps climbing.

We wrote about what AI Overviews do to organic clicks already in Your website is losing clicks to AI — the short version is they cut clicks to the top organic result by 30 to 60% on the searches that trigger one. This post is about what they're doing to paid clicks. The story is similar, just sharper.

Why paid ads used to make sense alongside SEO

Here's the historical case for running both. Google's own incrementality study found that roughly 89% of paid ad clicks were incremental — meaning the user wouldn't have clicked the organic result anyway. Paid bought you the impatient searchers. Organic captured the rest. Two different audiences, two different budgets. Reasonable strategy.

That logic still holds for searches that don't trigger an AI Overview. For searches that do, the page itself has changed shape.

What changed

AI Overviews compress the page. The user gets the answer above the fold without clicking anything. When ads do appear, they're labeled clearly and most users now scroll past, take the AI summary, and move on. The 19.7% → 6.34% drop is what that scrolling-past looks like in a chart.

The cost side hasn't gotten cheaper either. The cross-industry average for Google Ads costs $5.26 per click. For service verticals like home services, it's $7.85. So the deal you're getting on every $7.85 click on an AI Overview query, as of late 2025: about a 6% chance someone clicks your ad, versus about a 20% chance back in mid-2024. Same price. Less click.

So what do you do with the budget

Two things. Neither requires you to cancel your ads tomorrow.

1. Audit which of your money keywords trigger AI Overviews. Open an incognito window. Search the five or six terms you care most about. If most of them surface an AI Overview, the math we just walked through applies to most of your spend. If they don't trigger one, your ads are still working at the old rate — keep going.

2. Reallocate the part of your budget that's hitting AI Overview queries to becoming the source the AI Overview is summarizing. That's a different kind of work — it's about making your website the place Google's AI pulls answers from when someone asks about your service in your area. It's slower than buying a click, but it doesn't go away on a billing cycle. The pages you build today keep getting cited next month, next quarter, next year.

That's our Search Visibility work. The summary version: structured pages that answer real questions, set up in a way the AI can read cleanly. No tricks. Nothing Google has rejected.

The honest part

We're not telling you to drop Google Ads. For high-intent commercial keywords that don't trigger AI Overviews, paid still works. Brand-defense ads when competitors bid on your name — also worth it.

What we are saying: if more than half your spend is hitting queries that now show an AI Overview, you're paying what ads were worth before AI Overviews compressed the page. That's the moment to look at the budget split.

If you want a quick read on which of your keywords are in that bucket, reply to this with three or four of them and we'll send back what we see. No pitch attached.