Even ranking first, click-through appears to halve. Itera publishes a free LLMO Trend Report covering 30 industries, putting data behind the invisible search behaviour of the AI era
Itera, Inc. (head office: Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo; Representative Director: Takayuki Muto), which operates an AI marketing business, has published its LLMO Trend Report — making the latest movements in AI search and LLMO (large language model optimisation) visible — free of charge on the LLMOcheki website.
Background: search is becoming something people no longer click
With the spread of ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google’s AI Overview (AIO) and AI Mode, the way people gather information has shifted decisively away from the old structure of search, click, visit a site.
Zero-click search — where AI generates and completes an answer on the results page itself — is expanding rapidly. Yet in Japan there has been almost no source that quantifies how often a company’s own site is cited by AI, or how much traffic the arrival of AI Overview has actually affected.
On 14 July 2026, Itera released LLMOcheki, an AI agent for measuring and improving LLMO, and began continuously observing citation activity across AI search engines. This report aggregates and analyses the large-scale data from that observation platform across industries, and publishes it as an ongoing study that anyone can read at no cost.
Summary of the first report
- AI Overview appeared in 76.9% of queries (1,122 of 3,000). It now sits alongside “related searches” (87.6%) and “people also ask” (83.8%) as a standard component of the results page.
- When AI Overview is displayed, the estimated click-through rate for the top organic result falls from 28.4% to 15.3% — roughly a halving. The data confirms that the assumption “rank first, get the most traffic” is breaking down.
- The estimated zero-click rate is 55.6%. More than half of all searches are completed without any visit to a website.
- AI Overview appeared in more than 50% of queries across all 30 industries studied. We found no industry unaffected by AI search.
- YouTube, third-party media and personal blogs appear as AI Overview sources alongside official corporate sites, showing that competition for a place among the sources AI cites has already begun.
What the report covers
Estimated click-through rate by rank
Click-through rates by Google ranking position, compared with and without AI Overview, quantifying the impact of AIO on organic clicks at each position.
LLMO source domain ranking
A ranking of the domains AI search engines cite when generating answers, showing what a site that AI chooses actually looks like.
Cross-industry heatmap across 30 sectors
A side-by-side comparison of LLMO appearance rate, zero-click rate and click-through decline across 30 sectors, including SaaS, systems development, web production, recruitment, real estate, beauty and professional services — so you can see the AI search risk facing your own industry at a glance.
LLMO appearance rate ranking
A ranking of AI answer appearance rates by sector, showing which industries most urgently need an AI search strategy.
AIO appearance rate heatmap by sector, over time
A sector-by-time heatmap of how AIO appearance rates are moving, tracking the speed at which AI search is taking hold.
Why we are publishing this: no measurement, no strategy
In the market for AI search optimisation (LLMO), we believe that measuring the current situation accurately is where every strategy has to start. By publishing this report free of charge, we want marketers and business leaders to be able to see the AI search impact on their own industry and make LLMO decisions grounded in evidence.
The report page also includes a free audit of how well your own site is prepared for LLMO.
Report page https://itera-llmo.com/llmo-trend
Press release https://prtimes.jp/main/html/rd/p/000000027.000177930.html
Itera, Inc. https://itera.co.jp/