Between January and June 2025, featured snippets went from appearing on 15.41% of US desktop search results to 5.53%, according to an Ahrefs analysis of one million results summarized by Shno. In the same six months, AI Overviews grew 598%.
That one pair of numbers reframes every featured snippet statistic you have seen quoted in a pitch deck. Most of the famous figures were collected in a search engine that no longer exists. This page collects the numbers that still hold, the ones that moved, and what they mean for your content plan, with a source on every line.
How common featured snippets are now
The baseline most marketers still carry comes from Ahrefs’ study of two million featured snippets, which found that 12.3% of search queries showed one. That was a fair number for its era. It is not a fair number today.
The 2025 Ahrefs analysis cited above puts snippet visibility at 5.53% by June 2025, down 64% from January. Read that as the floor of a trend rather than a fixed figure. Google tests constantly, and individual industries swing hard in both directions.
Meanwhile the box that took its place kept growing, then wobbled. Semrush tracked AI Overviews on 6.49% of keywords in January 2025, nearly 25% in July, and 15.69% by November 2025. Pew Research Center, using browsing data from more than 900 US adults, found about 18% of all Google searches in March 2025 triggered an AI Overview.
Two caveats apply to all of these figures. Desktop and mobile results differ, and most large studies sample US desktop pages because they are easier to crawl. Your audience may skew mobile, where the answer box takes even more of the screen. And sampling methods vary, so a study of one million results and a study of ten million can disagree without either being wrong.
So the honest headline among featured snippet statistics is this: on informational queries, the snippet is now the minority answer format, and the AI Overview is the majority one.
What a snippet is worth in clicks
Click data is where sources split the most, so treat every number here as a range rather than a rule.
Ahrefs’ original two-million-snippet study found 8.6% of clicks went to the featured snippet, because many searchers got the answer and left. A 2025 study by First Page Sage reported that featured snippets, when present, absorb about 42.9% of clicks, the highest share of any element on the page.
Those two numbers can both be true. Query intent drives the gap. A definition query (“what is a press kit”) gets answered in the snippet and ends. A process query (“how to write a press kit”) earns the click because the reader needs the full page. If your snippet answers the whole question, you win the box and lose the visit.
There is also a position effect. Pages ranking below the snippet lose more than the snippet holder does, because the box pushes them down the screen. On mobile, a featured snippet plus a People Also Ask block can fill the entire first view, so position two is closer to position six in practice.
This is why we stopped judging snippet wins by clicks alone. Visibility for your brand name, cited above every competitor, has value even when the click never comes. That value just does not show up in Search Console.
The AI Overview squeeze, by the numbers
The second set of featured snippet statistics that matters is what happens when an AI Overview sits on top.
Ahrefs measured a 34.5% drop in click-through rate for the top-ranking page when an AI Overview appeared, across 300,000 keywords, in April 2025. Its December 2025 update found the gap had widened to 58%. Amsive, analyzing 700,000 keywords across ten sites, found an average 15.49% CTR drop, and a 37.04% drop when an AI Overview and a featured snippet appeared together.
Pew’s browsing study found users clicked a traditional result on 8% of visits when an AI summary appeared, against 15% when one did not. Google disputed Pew’s methodology, saying it sends billions of clicks to websites daily.
Seer Interactive’s data adds a twist. Organic CTR on queries with an Overview fell from 1.76% to 0.61% in its September 2025 study. A later Seer dataset covering 53 brands and 5.47 million queries showed organic CTR at 1.31% in December 2025, then recovering to 2.36% by February 2026. Clicks did not vanish. They dropped hard and then partly came back.
The pattern across all of these studies is consistent even when the numbers are not. Informational queries lost the most. The pages that held snippets were usually the same pages that ranked first, so they took the biggest hit.
Which formats still win
Paragraph snippets have always been the most common format, with lists and tables behind them. That mix matters more now, because format decides whether an AI Overview can swallow your answer.
A one-sentence definition is easy for an Overview to paraphrase. A seven-step process, a comparison table with five columns, or a pricing grid is much harder to compress without losing the reader. Those formats tend to keep both the snippet and the click.
AI Overviews also cite more than one source. One UK study summarized by SEO.ai found Overviews link to five or six websites on average, against the single source a snippet shows. That spreads attention, but it also means more pages can earn a mention. Ahrefs found that 86% of the top 50 most mentioned sites were not shared across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI Overviews, so winning one surface does not guarantee the others.
The practical read: if your content is a list, a table, or a process, structure it cleanly and you will compete in all three answer formats. If it is a definition, expect to be paraphrased.
Voice and zero-click: the stats people misquote
Two numbers get repeated so often that they deserve a warning label.
The first is the claim that half of all searches would be voice searches by 2020. It is usually pinned on comScore, and nobody has ever produced the comScore study behind it. Smart speakers do read snippet text aloud, which is why voice and snippets got linked in the first place, but there is no reliable recent figure for what share of searches are spoken.
The second is the blanket claim that AI Overviews kill all clicks. The data above shows serious losses on informational queries, but NP Digital’s June 2026 roundup found branded queries with AI Overviews showed an 18.7% CTR increase. Semrush also found that for the same terms, clicks rose slightly after an Overview appeared. The loss is real, but it is not universal, and it is not evenly spread.
If you quote a statistic in a client deck, check the date, the sample size, and whether the query set was informational, commercial, or branded. That one habit will save you from most of the bad numbers in circulation.
How to measure your own snippet share
Industry studies tell you the direction of travel. Your own data tells you whether it applies to you, and the gap between the two is often large.
Start in Google Search Console. Pull queries where your average position is between one and two and impressions are high but CTR is low. Those are the most likely snippet or Overview queries, because something above the blue links is answering the question. Export three months from a year ago and the last three months, and compare CTR on the same queries. If clicks fell while position held steady, an answer box is taking them.
Next, check the results page by hand for your top 30 queries. Note whether each one shows a featured snippet, an AI Overview, both, or neither, and whether your page is the source. Rank tracking tools such as Semrush and Ahrefs flag SERP features at scale, but a manual pass catches things tools miss, like a snippet that quotes you without your brand name in the visible text.
Then ask the same questions in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. Record which sources each one cites. Given how little overlap Ahrefs found across these assistants, expect different answers, and treat each one as its own channel.
Run this every quarter. One snapshot tells you very little. Four snapshots show you which pages are gaining answer share and which are losing it, and that trend is worth more than any industry average.
A final note on reporting. When you share these numbers with a client or a boss, separate visibility from visits. A page can hold the snippet, get cited in an Overview, and still lose half its clicks. That is a format problem, not a ranking problem, and the fix is different. Mixing the two leads to the wrong conclusion and the wrong budget.
The Snippet Survival Score
Raw statistics do not tell you which of your pages to protect. So we built a simple scoring model for that, the Snippet Survival Score. Give each page that holds a snippet one point for each statement that is true.
The query is commercial or branded, not purely informational. The answer format is a list, a table, or a multi-step process. The full answer needs more than 60 words to be useful. Your brand name appears inside the extracted text, not just on the page. The page is cited in at least one AI assistant for the same question.
A score of four or five means the page is likely to keep its visibility as AI Overviews expand, and it deserves regular refreshes. A score of two or three means it needs restructuring: break the answer into steps, add a comparison table, or put your brand in the first sentence of the answer block. A score of zero or one means the page is living on borrowed time, and your effort is better spent on pages that score higher.
We use this with clients before any refresh sprint. It turns a pile of featured snippet statistics into a short list of pages to fix this month.
What to do with these numbers
Start with the pages you already own in the answer box. Score them, restructure the weak ones, and track them across Google and the major assistants every quarter. New snippet targets come second, because defending visibility you have is cheaper than winning visibility you do not.
Featured snippets used to be a prize. In 2026 they are a training ground for the format every answer engine prefers: clear question, direct answer, structured detail. The pages that score well on the Snippet Survival Score are the same ones AI assistants quote, and that overlap is where your next year of search traffic will come from.