What Google AI Overviews Changed for Businesses in Türkiye

Google AI Overviews is already live in Türkiye; the question isn't "will it arrive" anymore, it's "what changed and what should I do." This article covers the official Turkey launch date, what global data shows about click behavior, and how to check your own visibility.

When did it start in Türkiye?

Per Google's official Turkish-language announcement, AI Mode and AI Overviews were added to the Google Search experience in Türkiye starting February 18, 2026, powered by the Gemini 3 model family. The announcement specifically states these features became available "gradually in the Google app for Android and iOS and on the search results page"; the rollout wasn't simultaneous for every user, it spread out over time.

What global data shows about click behavior

We could not find an independent, Turkey-specific click-behavior study, but Pew Research Center's study of 900 U.S. adults across 68,879 Google searches in March 2025 shows the general mechanism. The findings: when an AI summary appears, users click a traditional result link in only 8% of visits; without an AI summary, that rate is 15%. Clicking a link within the AI summary itself happens in just 1% of visits. Perhaps more striking: 26% of visits to pages with an AI summary end the session entirely (without going to another site), versus 16% for pages with only traditional results.

This is U.S. data; we're not claiming user behavior in Türkiye is identical. But since AI Overviews runs on the same product with a similar mechanism, the direction is likely similar: ranking at the top of the results no longer comes with the same automatic click guarantee it used to.

What these numbers concretely mean for your business

Let's translate Pew's data into your own business: suppose your site ranks at the top for a query. In the world before AI summaries, that meant roughly 15% of viewers clicked through to your site. In a search where an AI summary appears, that drops to 8%; so the same number of impressions could bring in nearly half as many visitors. And 26% of visitors end the search without continuing at all, meaning a user who might previously have scrolled down to the third or fourth result now leaves without visiting any site. This doesn't mean "SEO no longer works" on its own; ranking at the top still matters, but the amount of traffic that same ranking delivers may be changing.

Google's own position

Per Google's official documentation, "there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary"; general SEO best practices are enough. That's a reassuring statement, but it doesn't contradict the click data above: the conditions for ranking at the top haven't changed, but how much that top ranking converts into traffic has. We covered the on-site technical groundwork (structured data, AI crawler access) in detail in What is GEO?

Which businesses does this affect most?

The impact depends on how your business relates to search intent. For a content page answering a general information query ("what is X," "how do I do Y"), an AI summary can answer the question directly on the results page and never send the visitor to your site at all. For local and transactional queries like "[service] in Istanbul," on the other hand, the user usually wants to actually contact a business or book an appointment, so they're more likely to click through to a site eventually; the impact there is probably more limited. Thinking about which group your service is closer to clarifies how much priority this shift deserves.

How to check your own visibility

Google Search Console has a "Generative AI performance report" separate from the standard Performance report. Per Google's own description, this report shows impressions only; there's no clicks, CTR, or query breakdown. It does break down by country, device, and page. You can reach it at search.google.com/search-console/performance/search-analytics/ai or under "All reports and tools > Performance reports" in Search Console.

We tested this on our own account: we tried to pull this data through the standard Search Analytics API (the one you'd already be using for your site) and got an empty result. That could be because of our site's small traffic, or because this data is only accessible through the Search Console interface; we couldn't separate the two with certainty. For a clear answer on your own site, check the interface directly.

The practical implication for your business

Two things can be true at once: your click rate may drop, and your brand being named inside an AI summary may be a new form of visibility. That second part follows the same logic we covered in How to make your brand visible in ChatGPT: your brand name, service description, and location should stay consistent everywhere on your site, because AI summaries rely on that consistency.

A note on the limits of the data

We could not find an independent AI Overviews click-behavior study specific to the Turkish market; the Pew data above is from the U.S. We also found no official documentation on API access to Search Console's Generative AI report; our own test result (an empty response) is an observation, not definitive proof.

Conclusion

AI Overviews has been live in Türkiye since February 18, 2026, and Google says no extra optimization is needed for it. But global data shows that ranking at the top no longer comes with the same automatic click guarantee it used to. The most concrete next step is checking your own Search Console's Generative AI report to see how often your site shows up in these summaries.

If you'd like to review your SEO and GEO strategy against this shift together, you can try our free SEO checker tool or book a call.