By December 3, Google must give publishers impressions, clicks and click-through rate for its AI features shown in the U.K., according to a Competition and Markets Authority summary reported by Search Engine Journal. The deadline falls days after Black Friday. It would be the first time Google is required to report clicks, and not only appearances, from AI Overviews and AI Mode.
The timing matters to commerce sites because a related decision has been open since August 31, when Google made its Search Console control for leaving those AI features available worldwide. As Digiday reported, publishers are holding off on opting out until they see click data. Until then, retailers and brands have been judging AI search on a handful of estimates, most of them self-reported. This week added four: a consultant's single-site test, a publisher's earnings call, a platform growth multiple with no base, and a glimpse of an OpenAI dashboard that has not launched.
What Google must report, and what the opt-out removes
The CMA imposed its Publisher Conduct Requirement on June 3 under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, PPC Land reported. Search Engine Journal reports that the CMA's interpretive notes call for the metrics to be broken down by publisher, to show whether content appeared in an AI feature or an organic result, and to be delivered through a commonly accessible platform such as Search Console. The figures are aggregated across features, so a site would not see AI Mode separately from AI Overviews. Google has not confirmed a global release. Sources also differ on timing: PPC Land and the Professional Publishers Association say only the page-level control gets extra time, to March 3, 2027, while Tech Policy Press describes nine months for Google to implement the main obligations.
The control itself is bundled. According to 9to5Google, opted-out sites get no traffic or impressions from AI Overviews, AI Mode or AI Overviews in Discover but stay in regular Search, and Google says the choice will not be used as a ranking signal. The CMA requirement also bars Google from downranking opted-out content, per PPC Land. The effect on product listings is less clear. Agencies including Saffron Edge say the control does not override Merchant Center or Google Ads participation, but we could not confirm that against Google's documentation, and no source we found says whether opting out removes product listings shown inside AI Overviews or AI Mode. The open questions are tracked on our Google AI search opt-out story page.
The click estimates point in different directions
The most concrete number comes from Cyrus Shepard, founder of Zyppy SEO, who estimates Google's AI features drove about 21% of his site's clicks. He opted out for 28 days and compared periods. AI features held about 10% of the site's impressions, with an estimated click-through rate of about 0.9% against a sitewide average near 0.4%. Shepard called it a "directional yardstick" from one site that has worked to win AI citations.
Larger studies frame the question differently. Seer Interactive, across 53 brands and 5.47 million queries, found click-through of about 3.3% with no AI Overview, about 2.1% when a page is cited in one and about 0.9% when it is not, Search Engine Land reported. An Ahrefs rerun comparing desktop data from December 2023 and December 2025 found a 58% lower click-through rate for top-ranking pages. Google CEO Sundar Pichai has said links inside AI Overviews get higher click-through rates, a claim Ahrefs disputes. We found no independent study separating commerce queries from informational ones.
Publishers that send shoppers to merchants report steeper losses. Ziff Davis CEO Vivek Shah said Google referrals fell about 37% in the third quarter and that its content appeared in AI features about 2.7 billion times, "nearly 10 times the clicks" from Google Search, according to the call transcript. PPC Land cautioned that impressions and clicks are not a clean comparison.
Conversion claims rest on growth rates
On the other side of the ledger, Shopify President Harley Finkelstein said AI-channel orders grew 3.3x and that AI-referred shoppers convert 64% more often, without disclosing the base and while acknowledging volume is still small. Adobe reported that in September, AI traffic to U.S. retail sites rose 71% and converted 90% better than non-AI traffic, Retail TouchPoints reported, and it forecasts 130% growth this holiday season. Adobe describes overall volume as modest. A study of 973 e-commerce sites cited by PPC Land found ChatGPT referrals converted below every channel except paid social between August 2024 and July 2025, though PPC Land notes the sample and period differ from Shopify's. Adobe's own data shows AI traffic moving from underperforming to outperforming in about a year, which may explain part of the gap.
OpenAI may add a second first-party count. It is testing a ChatGPT dashboard of brand mentions and clicks, per Digiday, that hides prompts and competitor rankings and has not launched; OpenAI declined to comment. Mojodojo notes that nobody outside OpenAI knows how a mention is counted. Meanwhile, the claim that ChatGPT handles a fifth of Google's search volume came from an interview with no published method.
What would settle the question for commerce is narrower than any of these headlines: per-site splits of AI and organic clicks, a Google statement on product listings, and disclosed bases behind the conversion multiples.