Featured Snippets in 2026: Do They Still Matter Next to AI Overviews

Position zero used to be the reward every SEO chased: get your answer into the box at the top of the page, and you’d earn the click even without ranking first. That trade is breaking down. Google’s own AI Overviews are increasingly the thing sitting where the featured snippet used to be, and the data on what that’s done to featured snippets — and to clicks generally — is now solid enough to actually look at.

The Decline, in Actual Numbers

Ahrefs tracked roughly one million U.S. desktop SERPs between January and June 2025 and found featured snippet visibility fell from 15.41% of tracked queries to 5.53% — a 64% drop in six months. Over the same window, AI Overview presence grew by roughly 598%. Those two lines moving in opposite directions that sharply, in the same tracked dataset, is about as close to a smoking gun as SEO data gets. Sitelinks, interestingly, grew even faster over that period, which suggests the SERP is reshuffling more broadly than just “AI Overviews replaced snippets.”

The CTR Study That Explains Why It Matters

Separately, Ahrefs’ Ryan Law and Xibeijia Guan published an April 2025 study analyzing 300,000 keywords — 150,000 with AI Overviews present, 150,000 comparable informational queries without — comparing March 2024 to March 2025. The top-ranking page’s average click-through rate fell 34.5% on queries with an AI Overview compared to similar queries without one. For position one specifically, CTR on AI Overview queries dropped from about 7.3% to 2.6%, versus a smaller decline, 5.6% to 3.1%, on non-AI-Overview queries over the same period. Ranking first still helps, but it stopped guaranteeing a click at anywhere near the old rate. I’ve also seen more recent reporting from early 2026 citing even steeper aggregate decline figures, in the high-50-percent range — I’d flag those specific numbers as coming through secondary press coverage rather than a primary report I could verify directly, so treat the direction as credible and the exact figure as unconfirmed.

Do Featured Snippets Still Do Anything?

Some SERP tracking suggests pages that already hold a featured snippet get pulled into AI Overview citations at a noticeably higher rate than pages that don’t, which would make snippet-winning content a feeder for AI Overview visibility rather than a dead end. I haven’t been able to trace that specific multiplier to one primary dataset I’d stake confidence on, but directionally it lines up with how these systems are built: both featured snippets and AI Overviews reward the same underlying trait, a direct, well-structured answer near the top of well-organized content.

What Actually Changed for Site Owners

• Chasing position zero purely for the click-through boost is a much less reliable bet than it was two or three years ago.
• Direct-answer formatting — a clear question as a heading, a concise answer in the first sentence or two beneath it — is still worth doing, because it’s the same shape both featured snippets and AI Overviews pull from.
• The audience for that formatting has partly shifted from “the featured snippet algorithm” to “whatever system is assembling the AI Overview,” and those aren’t guaranteed to be the same selection logic.
• Zero-click search generally is up, snippet or not — measuring success by rankings alone, without checking actual clicks in Search Console, increasingly overstates real traffic.

Position zero used to be the reward. Now it’s often the raw material — Google lifts your well-structured answer to build something the user never has to click through to see. The formatting habit that used to earn a click now sometimes just earns a citation, or nothing at all.

I’d still format content for direct answers, because it’s cheap to do and it still occasionally wins the click. What I’d stop doing is building a content strategy around snippet acquisition as if owning the box reliably drives traffic. Check the actual clicks and impressions for those queries in Search Console before deciding a snippet win was worth the effort — the box itself doesn’t tell you that anymore.