Men’s Journal Traffic Is Up 415% Since Google AI Overviews Launched. Here’s Who Else Is Winning
Authored by: Farrukh Abdullah
61% is the number everyone in SEO has been repeating since last fall. Organic click-through rate on pages with an AI Overview fell from 1.76% to 0.61%, according to Seer Interactive’s analysis from September 2025. It’s real. It’s also the last data point most people writing about this topic have bothered to check.
Seer kept collecting data. Their April 2026 update covers a lot more ground: 53 brands, 5.47 million queries, 2.43 billion impressions, running from January 2025 through February 2026. And it tells a messier, more useful story than the one that made headlines. Brand-cited AI Overview pages did see CTR fall 61% between Q3 and Q4 2025. But impressions on those same pages roughly doubled over that stretch, and total clicks barely moved. Then, in January and February 2026, something nobody predicted happened: CTR climbed back from a floor of 1.3% to 2.4%. An 85% jump in two months.
Hardly anyone’s written about that part yet. If your SEO strategy is still built around “the 61% collapse,” you’re planning around data that’s already been updated twice.
It was never a flat loss
The damage was never spread evenly, and the newer data makes the split sharper.
Branded queries are gaining, not losing. Estimates put the CTR lift for branded searches with an AI Overview at around 18%, because the summary adds context that makes people more likely to click through rather than less. The pain concentrates almost entirely in informational, definitional, top-of-funnel content. The “what is,” “how to,” “best X for Y” pages that used to be the backbone of most content strategies.
Getting cited inside the summary matters more than ranking does. Depending on which Seer dataset you look at, brands cited inside an AI Overview pull somewhere between 35% and 120% more clicks per impression than uncited brands sitting on the very same results page. Ranking well used to be the whole game. Now it’s necessary but nowhere near sufficient.
And it’s not really about your rank anymore, either. One industry traffic analysis found that sites already in the top 10 for their categories grew slightly, about 1.6%, through this period. The sites getting squeezed hardest sit further down, roughly in the 100th to 10,000th range. A page that used to survive an algorithm update just by holding position 4 doesn’t have that safety net anymore.
The winners nobody’s naming
Most coverage of this shift treats every publisher as a casualty. Some clearly aren’t.
People.com posted a 27% year-over-year traffic gain. Men’s Journal roughly quadrupled its traffic, up 415%. Cooldown.com grew 96%. Substack grew 40% and climbed to the 19th most-visited news site in the US. Format is the common thread, not luck. These sites lean on visuals, personality, and entertainment value, the kind of thing that doesn’t compress into a three-sentence summary the way a generic explainer does. Newsletter-native platforms just sidestep the search dependency entirely.
You’ll hear HubSpot mentioned constantly as the poster child for AI Overviews destroying a content machine. Be careful with that one. Most analysts trace the bulk of that collapse to Google’s core and spam algorithm updates from December 2024, not AI Overviews specifically. The two got tangled together in the same news cycle, but they’re not the same story, and treating them as one is the kind of mistake that undermines everything else you say on this topic.
What I’m actually changing for clients
Two things, not ten.
First, building out pages that clearly establish who a brand is and how it connects to known entities, tied together with sameAs schema pointing to Wikidata. This is what makes a brand legible enough to a knowledge graph to get pulled into an answer instead of buried below one.
Second, restructuring content into direct Q&A blocks with FAQ and HowTo schema, because that’s the format AI systems lift cleanly. You can get cited without ranking first now. That lever barely existed five years ago.
One more thing worth tracking if Perplexity citations matter to your traffic mix. There’s no single definitive study on this, but several citation-tracking analyses land on roughly the same number: content older than 60 to 90 days starts losing ground, and Perplexity seems to weight freshness harder than Google’s AI Overviews or ChatGPT do. If your best-performing pages haven’t been touched since last year, fix that before anything else on this list.
The part people don’t want to hear
Wil Reynolds, CEO of Seer Interactive, has been open about his own numbers. His organic search traffic dropped 41%. Instead of trying to claw it back, his team leaned into whatever was still converting. Newsletter signups climbed 65% over the same stretch, and revenue held flat. At one point he put it in blunter terms: it took 13,000 visits from search to generate 67 newsletter signups, and only 2,821 visits from social to generate 66. Losing search traffic and growing the business turned out not to be mutually exclusive, once he stopped treating Google as the only door into the building.
That’s the conversation I’m having with clients now. Not “how do we get the old traffic back,” but “which channel doesn’t live or die on Google’s mood this quarter.” For some accounts that’s a newsletter. For others it’s Reddit, or YouTube, or just building enough of a direct audience that one algorithm update stops being an extinction-level event.
If you’re still building a content strategy around a stat from last September, you’re not just behind Google. You’re behind your own industry’s data.
Author bio: Farrukh Abdullah Semantic SEO & GEO Consultant
P.S. If you want your AI search visibility audited, reply to this or visit https://farrukh.top