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AI’s Wrecking the Web and CTRs Are the First Casualty

Google’s AI Overviews are gutting clicks, inboxes are collapsing, and real marketing is getting harder. Here’s how to stay visible.

Author

Ian Mutuli
November 07, 2025

In partnership with

Search, ads, email, and content are all being rewritten by AI. CTRs are collapsing, inboxes are tightening, and Google just dropped a tool that can build your brand identity in minutes.

In this month’s roundup:

  • Google’s AI Overviews are quietly gutting CTRs across both paid and organic.

  • Campaign Monitor shares holiday deliverability tactics to survive inbox chaos.

  • Five Google Ads habits to ditch before 2026 hits.

  • Cindy Krum dives into the “Dead Internet” theory and what it means for human-made SEO.

  • Benjamin Houy shuts down Lorelight, proving GEO isn’t a strategy — good marketing is.

  • And Google Labs teams up with DeepMind on Pomelli, a new AI tool that builds your brand’s “DNA.”

Let’s unpack what’s changing and what still matters most: building real authority, earning trust, and staying human in a machine-driven web.

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Why Lorelight Shut Down and What It Proves About “GEO”

Benjamin Houy, the founder of Lorelight just shut his GEO app down and wrote a short summary on LinkedIn explain the reasons why GEO was not actually a thing:

  • Lorelight’s Goal: A GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) tool to track brand mentions and visibility in AI search (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity).

  • The Reality: It worked but didn’t change behavior. Users still relied on the same fundamentals: good content, strong reputation, real expertise.

🔍 The Core Insight

  • Brands cited by AI already had what’s always mattered:
    ✅ High-quality, helpful content
    ✅ Mentions in authoritative publications
    ✅ Established trust and thought leadership

  • In short: AI cites authority not optimization tricks.

⚙️ Why It Didn’t Work as a Product

  • GEO data didn’t alter what marketers needed to do.

  • AI search evolves too fast for a standalone tool to stay relevant.

  • GEO makes sense only as a feature inside big SEO suites (like Ahrefs), not a separate product.

🎯 The Lesson
Don’t build tools for problems that don’t exist. The winning strategy hasn’t changed:
👉 Create authentic, valuable content
👉 Build real authority
👉 Serve real people

At Click Raven, we found this to be relatable too. Over the last few weeks, we tried pivoting Click Raven into an AI Search tracker. We got 350 users who came in to give it a try but none of the users actually stuck. The app was doing what it needed to do, but after talking to 75 users in long running email chats, we came to one conclusion, GEO and AI visibility tracking was an interesting tool, but not a pain to be solved. And so we shut down the Click Raven AI visibility app too.

As someone who has run several online businesses in the past, we are looking to build something that actually helps our audience to achieve specific goals. Stay tuned for more!

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AI Overviews Impact on Google CTR: September 2025 Snapshot

Google’s AI Overviews (AIOs) are reshaping how users interact with search — and the click-through fallout keeps getting worse.

  • The Study involved 3,119 queries across 42 orgs (June 2024–Sept 2025)

  • Organic CTRs down 61% for AIO queries

  • Paid CTRs down 65% for AIO queries

  • Even non-AIO queries dropped 41% in organic CTR and 32% in paid CTR

Being cited in AIOs boosts performance dramatically:

  • +35% organic CTR (0.70% vs 0.52%)

  • +91% paid CTR (7.89% vs 4.14%)

Strategy for 2026

  • Treat AIO citations as your competitive moat.

  • Re-evaluate KPIs → track share of voice, not clicks.

  • Question high-funnel paid search — CTR efficiency is collapsing.

  • Diversify beyond Google (AI engines, social search, direct traffic)

“Dead Internet Theory” — Bots Talking to Bots

  • AI-generated content is flooding the web, blurring lines between human and machine creation.

  • Risk: A future where bots create, read, and rank each other’s content — drowning out authentic human voices.

  • Result: Decline in trust, creativity, and true originality online.

🔄 Google’s Shifting AI Stance

  • Google now expects human review before indexing AI content — though its own AIOs don’t meet that standard.

  • Unlimited AI-generated content = index overload → Google tightening what it indexes.

  • Outcome: “All-human” creators risk being buried under AI-assisted noise.

Until next time.

Ian at Click Raven, Inc