14 min read · Last updated 25 February 2026
Google's search results are being systematically remonetised, and text ads — not AI Overviews — are the primary driver of organic click decline. New data from Aleyda Solis shows classic organic click share fell up to 23 percentage points in a single year, while paid ads more than doubled their share. For B2B companies relying on answer engine optimisation and organic search, the implications are profound.
The SEO industry has spent the past 18 months blaming AI Overviews for declining organic traffic. That narrative is incomplete — and potentially dangerous if it leads you to the wrong strategy. In this analysis, Whitehat SEO breaks down what the data actually shows, how the AI search ecosystem is splitting between ad-heavy and citation-heavy platforms, and what UK B2B marketing directors should do about it right now.
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Google is redistributing clicks from organic results to paid ads across every commercial vertical, according to Aleyda Solis's February 2026 analysis of approximately 16,000 US queries using Similarweb clickstream data. In the headphones vertical, classic organic click share collapsed from 73% to 50% in twelve months, while combined paid results (text ads plus product listing ads) more than doubled from 16% to 36%.
This pattern repeated everywhere Solis looked. In jeans, organic fell 17 percentage points. In greeting cards, 13 points. In online games — a vertical with historically minimal advertising — text ads quadrupled from 3% to 13%. The data paints a clear picture: this is not an AI problem. It is a deliberate, structural remonetisation of Google Search.
Text ads gained 7–13 percentage points of click share across every vertical studied — consistently the single largest driver of organic decline.
Google's own Q4 2025 earnings confirm the financial reality behind these shifts. Search revenue hit £50.4 billion ($63.07B) in a single quarter, up 17% year-on-year, accelerating throughout 2025. Full-year revenue exceeded $400 billion for the first time. Google's Chief Business Officer stated that Gemini's understanding of intent has increased their ability to deliver ads on longer, more complex searches — precisely the query types B2B marketers depend upon.
Total click volume is also shrinking. In headphones, total clicks from the top 5,000 queries fell from 2.5 million to 1.8 million. Classic organic isn't just getting a smaller share — the pie itself is smaller. For B2B companies building B2B SEO strategies around traffic-based KPIs, this creates a compound problem.
The industry narrative has focused almost exclusively on AI Overviews as the cause of organic decline, but Solis's data tells a different story. Text ads consistently gained the most click share in every vertical, while AI Overview penetration varied dramatically — from roughly 10 percentage points of growth in jeans to 30 points in headphones. Text ads were the one constant.
This matters strategically because it changes what you should do about it. If the problem were purely AI Overviews, the solution would be purely AEO. But the remonetisation cycle is self-reinforcing: as organic visibility shrinks, brands increase paid spend to compensate, which further compresses organic real estate, which drives more paid investment. Solis identified that the sites losing the most organic clicks were the same ones ramping up paid investment — Amazon, Walmart, Bose, CrazyGames.
Multiple independent studies corroborate the squeeze. Tinuiti's Q4 2025 Benchmark Report found Google text ad clicks hit a 19-quarter high, growing 9% year-on-year. Ahrefs measured AI Overviews reducing position-one CTR by 58% across 300,000 keywords. Seer Interactive's longitudinal study found organic CTR on AI Overview queries dropped 61%. Even queries without AI Overviews saw a 41% decline — suggesting the broader SERP layout changes are affecting all organic results.
| Source | Finding | Date |
|---|---|---|
| Aleyda Solis / Similarweb | Organic click share fell 11–23pp across all verticals | Feb 2026 |
| Ahrefs (300K keywords) | AI Overviews reduce position #1 CTR by 58% | Dec 2025 |
| Seer Interactive | Organic CTR on AIO queries dropped 61% | Nov 2025 |
| Pew Research Center | Only 8% of users click any link when AIO present | Jul 2025 |
| GrowthSRC (200K keywords) | Position #1 CTR down 32% year-on-year | 2025 |
| Tinuiti Q4 Benchmark | Google text ad clicks hit 19-quarter high (+9% YoY) | Feb 2026 |
There is a credible counterpoint. Graphite's analysis of 40,000 websites found organic search traffic down just 2.5% overall. The reconciliation is straightforward: aggregate organic traffic is roughly stable because query volume keeps growing, but click share within verticals is shifting dramatically from organic to paid. Both things are true simultaneously — and the latter is what should worry B2B marketing directors planning their 2026 budgets.
The AI search ecosystem is splitting into fundamentally different models, and this divergence is the most strategically significant development for answer engine optimisation in 2026. Google is aggressively monetising its AI features. Meanwhile, other platforms are making starkly different choices about the role of advertising in AI-generated answers.
| Platform | Ad Status (Feb 2026) | Revenue Model |
|---|---|---|
| Google AI Overviews | Active, expanding to 12 countries | Advertising-first |
| ChatGPT | Launched ads 9 Feb 2026 (free tiers) | Subscription + ads |
| Perplexity | Abandoned ads entirely | Subscription-only ($200M ARR) |
| Claude (Anthropic) | Committed ad-free | Subscription / enterprise |
| Google Gemini (app) | No ads (confirmed by execs) | Freemium / subscription |
Perplexity's decision to abandon advertising entirely is a landmark moment. The company generated just $20,000 in ad revenue against $34 million total revenue in 2024 before deciding ads were fundamentally incompatible with user trust. Their CEO stated the rationale directly: users need to believe they are getting the best possible answer, not a commercially influenced one. Perplexity has since reached $200 million in annual recurring revenue on subscriptions alone.
Meanwhile, 63% of US adults told Ipsos that ads in AI search results make them trust results less. This trust gap is creating a two-tier system: ad-heavy platforms where organic visibility is compressed, and ad-free platforms where citation-based visibility is the only route to brand presence. For B2B marketers, this divergence means you can no longer treat "AI search" as a single channel. Your strategy for Google AI Overviews must be fundamentally different from your strategy for Perplexity or Claude.
Organic search drives 44.6% of all B2B revenue according to BrightEdge — more than double any other digital channel. SEO leads close at 14.6% versus 1.7% for outbound. For UK mid-market companies, 71% of B2B buyers start research with a Google search (Sopro 2025). The channel matters enormously. Which is exactly why the remonetisation data should concern you.
B2B search strategies are disproportionately exposed to these shifts because they depend heavily on informational content: problem definitions, comparison guides, "how to choose" articles, framework explanations. AI Overviews appear in 99.9% of informational keywords according to Ahrefs, and 46% of those are long-tail queries of seven or more words — the exact query types that characterise B2B research.
80% of B2B buyers now use ChatGPT and Perplexity for vendor research as much as traditional search (eMarketer, November 2025).
Buyer behaviour is shifting in parallel. UK and Ireland B2B buyers control 57% of their journey before contacting any vendor (6sense/MarketOne), and buying committees averaging 10–11 people complete 90% of research before talking to sales. When these committees search on Google, they now face compressed organic results, expanded ads, and AI-generated summaries that may or may not cite your content. When they search on ChatGPT or Perplexity, they get citation-based answers where your presence depends entirely on content quality and entity authority.
In Whitehat SEO's experience working with UK B2B companies, the marketing teams that are adapting fastest share three characteristics: they measure pipeline impact rather than traffic, they invest in original research content, and they've started monitoring AI citation patterns alongside traditional rankings. The teams still reporting on organic sessions to their boards are likely overstating their channel health.
Whitehat SEO's free website audit identifies your most at-risk keywords and recommends AEO priorities specific to your B2B vertical.
Book Your Free AuditHere's the counterintuitive take: Google's remonetisation of search actually increases the strategic value of answer engine optimisation for B2B companies. Whitehat SEO sees three reasons this is the case, each supported by recent data.
First, citation acts as a defensive moat. Seer Interactive found that brands cited in AI Overviews earn 35% more organic clicks and 91% more paid clicks than brands that aren't cited. As organic real estate compresses, being cited in AI responses becomes one of the few remaining ways to maintain competitive separation without purely outspending competitors on ads.
Second, AI traffic converts at dramatically higher rates. Research analysing 12 million website visits found AI platform traffic converts at 14.2% compared to 2.8% for Google organic — a fivefold difference. For B2B specifically, AI-sourced traffic carries 4.4 times higher economic value per visit. When someone arrives at your site via an AI citation, they've already been told you're relevant to their problem. That pre-qualification drives conversion.
Third, ad-free platforms reward organic visibility exclusively. Perplexity (subscription-only) and Claude (committed ad-free) offer no paid shortcut to brand presence. The only way to appear in these responses is through content quality, entity authority, and the kind of structured, citable information that AEO prioritises. While Google still sends 345 times more traffic than ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity combined (Ahrefs 2025), AI referral traffic is growing 165 times faster than organic search traffic (WebFX). The trajectory matters.
💡 Whitehat SEO insight: The organic citation window is closing. Seer Interactive identified a significant algorithmic shift in ChatGPT beginning 1 December 2025 — 46 days before OpenAI's public advertising announcement. Brands that build citation authority now will hold dominant positions when paid auctions expand. This is the same pattern we saw with Google's organic results 15 years ago: early movers who built authority before the ad ecosystem matured held advantages for years.
Most SERP composition studies are US-focused, and UK patterns are measurably different. Solis's own presentation at SEO Week London in May 2025 showed that UK organic SERP shifts were more mixed than US data, with zero-click searches actually decreasing in half of UK e-commerce verticals she examined. The UK search ecosystem is evolving on a different timeline.
That said, the UK is not immune. Tank Digital Agency's study of 800 UK companies across 16 sectors found average monthly organic traffic growth collapsed 86% — from 26.3% to 3.7% — following Google's AI search rollout in the UK. Authoritas data submitted to the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) showed UK publishers losing 47.5% desktop CTR and 37.7% mobile CTR when AI Overviews appeared. DMG Media (Daily Mail) reported an 89% desktop CTR decline on affected queries.
The UK also has a growing AI search user base. IAB UK/UKOM data from October 2025 showed 22.5 million UK people used AI tools, with 84% of time spent on ChatGPT. Google holds 93.35% of UK search market share (StatCounter), meaning the remonetisation dynamics are highly concentrated. For UK B2B companies, the strategic implication is clear: you need both a Google-specific strategy (defending organic share, considering paid investment) and a platform-diversified AEO strategy (building citation authority on ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude).
Based on Whitehat SEO's analysis of these trends and our work with UK B2B companies navigating the shift, here are five actions that matter most — ordered by impact.
Traffic-based metrics are increasingly disconnected from revenue in a zero-click, AI-summarised environment. The CMOs leading this shift are already reporting share of AI voice (33% cite this as their top visibility KPI) ahead of share of traditional search (21%), according to 3Thinkrs' 2026 research. Track AI brand visibility, citation rates, and assisted conversions alongside traditional rankings.
Articles based on original data accounted for 50% of clicks from AI sources while making up only 5% of organic clicks — a tenfold increase, according to LocaliQ's Elisa Gabbert. The Content Marketing Institute reports that 86% of marketers plan to increase proprietary research budgets in 2026. Content based on your own client data, surveys, and analysis is dramatically more likely to be cited by AI systems than compiled third-party statistics.
Entity presence across four or more platforms yields a 2.8 times increase in AI citation likelihood. For B2B specifically, this means: G2 reviews (the most-cited B2B review platform across all AI systems), LinkedIn thought leadership, relevant subreddit participation, YouTube content, and keeping Wikipedia or Wikidata entries current. Each AI platform has different citation preferences — ChatGPT favours Wikipedia (47.9% of top citations), Perplexity favours Reddit (46.7%), and Google AI Overviews draw more from YouTube (18.8%) and LinkedIn.
Top-of-funnel informational content is most exposed to both AI summarisation and ad encroachment. Bottom-of-funnel content — product comparisons, pricing pages, case studies, interactive tools like ROI calculators, and demo content — is less likely to trigger AI Overviews and more likely to convert the visitors it does attract. In Whitehat SEO's content strategy work, we consistently see the highest pipeline impact from mid-to-bottom funnel assets.
Research shows 44.2% of LLM citations come from the first 30% of text on a page. Front-load citable claims, use question-based headings with concise 40–60 word answers, and ensure each section can be understood independently. Content updated within three months averages six AI citations compared to 3.6 for outdated pages. This isn't a one-off project — it's an ongoing content maintenance discipline. Whitehat SEO's SEO services now include systematic AEO auditing as a core deliverable for exactly this reason.
No. Aleyda Solis's February 2026 analysis of 16,000 queries found text ads gained 7–13 percentage points of click share across every vertical studied — consistently the largest single driver of organic decline. AI Overviews compound the problem but are not the primary cause.
Studies vary, but Ahrefs found AI Overviews reduce position one CTR by 58%, while Seer Interactive measured a 61% organic CTR decline on queries where AI Overviews appear. Pew Research found only 8% of users click any link when an AI Overview is present.
Yes — more than ever. Brands cited in AI Overviews earn 35% more organic clicks and 91% more paid clicks according to Seer Interactive. AI platform traffic converts at 14.2% versus 2.8% for Google organic, making AEO visitors significantly more valuable for B2B lead generation.
As of February 2026, Perplexity abandoned advertising entirely to preserve user trust, Claude (Anthropic) remains committed to ad-free products, and Google's Gemini standalone app has no ads. Google AI Overviews and ChatGPT (free tiers) both carry advertising.
Shift KPIs from traffic to pipeline and AI visibility. Invest in original research content, which earns 10 times more AI citations. Build entity presence across multiple platforms. Prioritise bottom-of-funnel content that resists AI summarisation. Treat answer engine optimisation as urgent infrastructure, not future experimentation.
Whitehat SEO's free website audit analyses your keyword portfolio against AI Overview prevalence, identifies your most vulnerable traffic sources, and maps your current AI citation visibility. Takes 30 minutes. No obligation.
Book Your Free SEO & AEO AuditWant to see the full picture first? Read our B2B SEO Strategy guide for 2026.
Clwyd Probert
CEO & Founder at Whitehat SEO
Clwyd leads Whitehat SEO, a HubSpot Diamond Partner agency and one of the UK's first agencies to offer dedicated Answer Engine Optimisation services. He runs the world's largest HubSpot User Group in London and lectures on digital marketing at UCL.