The honest answer — from someone who runs ads for a living. Saurav · sauravdoesmarketing.com · May 2026 · 6 min read I get this question almost every week now. A founder, a brand manager, or a fellow marketer pulls me aside and asks: ", everyone's using ChatGPT and Gemini to search these days — does Google Ads even make sense anymore?" It's a fair question. And I'm not going to give you the consultant's answer of "it depends." I'm going to give you the real answer — with data

Short answer: Yes, but with eyes open — it's evolving fast, not dying. The Real Concern You're Pointing To 93% of AI Mode queries end without a single click to an external website. And paid CTR for queries with AI Overviews dropped from 19.70% to 6.34% between June 2024 and September 2025. That's a real, measurable hit — especially for informational queries. Digital Applied TeamSearch Influence But Google Isn't Losing Ad Revenue Google Search delivered double-digit revenue gr

The traffic reality is grim for generic informational content: AI Overviews reduce organic CTR for the #1 result by ~58% on informational queries (Ahrefs, Dec 2025). Position-one CTR for AI-Overview keywords fell from 0.073 to 0.016 between Dec 2023 and Dec 2025. Seer Interactive (Sept 2025): organic CTR on AIO queries fell ~61% (1.76% → 0.61%). Pew Research (July 22, 2025), analyzing 68,879 searches from 900 US adults, found: "Users who encountered an AI summary clicked on a