Shopping ad CTR is climbing. Mike Ryan, head of ecommerce at Smarter Ecommerce, saw roughly a 20% increase in his company’s Market Observer benchmark, and separate Optmyzr data showed CTR up 17% year over year. That looks like better performance — until you look underneath.
Across thousands of Shopping and Performance Max campaigns in hundreds of advertiser accounts, Ryan found clicks were often flat or slightly down, while impressions fell more noticeably. Shopping ads weren’t earning many more clicks. They were being shown less often, which pushed CTR up.
Ryan theorizes that Google may be more likely to show AI Overviews on queries with a lower predicted chance of an ad click, while keeping Shopping ads for searches with stronger click propensity. If so, Google could cut Shopping impressions without cutting clicks at the same rate. Two seemingly contradictory things become true at once: AI Overviews suppress some ad opportunities, while the remaining ads keep monetizing well.
He calls this “experience switching.” Anecdotally, he rarely sees Shopping ads and AI Overviews on the same results page — it’s usually one or the other. Where publishers face the SEO “crocodile effect” of rising impressions and falling clicks, Shopping ads show the reverse: fewer impressions and higher CTR.
Ryan is explicit that the data does not prove causation. The timing could be coincidental, AI Overviews could contribute through another mechanism, or something else could explain the drop. He expects Google to move from “either/or” toward “both/and” as it builds AI-native formats that place Shopping ads inside AI Overviews — which means today’s pattern may be temporary.
Judging performance on CTR alone is risky. Pair it with:
AI Overviews are already a paid search variable. They can contradict the ad right above them and raise CPCs, and their reach keeps expanding as AI Overviews jumped from 15% to 43% of searches. When a report says CTR improved, the first question should be why.
In many accounts, clicks were flat while impressions fell, so the higher CTR reflects fewer impressions rather than more engagement.
No. It is Mike Ryan’s hypothesis, and he says the data does not prove causation.
Impressions, impression share, clicks and total traffic, segmented by query type, with benchmarks reset rather than compared year over year at face value.
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