Brand SEO in Tier-1 After AI Overviews: How Many FTDs a Review Site Delivers When Google Stopped Sending Clicks

Publicly traded affiliates reported their Q2 2026 results, revealing a strange picture: more new depositors, but revenue growing more slowly or falling. At the same time, Ahrefs noted that AI Overviews now appear in 83% of branded Google results. 15M compiled publicly available data and calculated how many FTDs and how much revenue a Tier-1 review site loses for every 100,000 organic visits.

Key Takeaways

• Clicks are vanishing quicker than you might think. According to Ahrefs (February 2026), when there’s an AI Overview, the click-through rate for top positions drops by 58% – compared to just a year ago, when it was estimated at 34.5%. According to Seer Interactive, the organic click-through rate for searches featuring an AI Overview has fallen from 1.76% down to 0.61%. Google, on the other hand, claims that the overall number of clicks is “relatively stable”;
• Branded searches aren’t shielded anymore. As of September 29, 2026, AI Overviews showed up in 82.91% of Google’s branded search results on U.S. desktop, in contrast to 13.1% in November 2025. In 76% of instances where the block shows up (on the Ahrefs dashboard, out of 100 global brands – in 48 out of 63 cases), it takes the top slot and references Wikipedia and YouTube instead of review sites;
• 15M Calculation: A review site attracting 100,000 organic visits monthly generates about 1,050 FTDs and $262,500 at a CPA of $250. If there’s a 30% drop in clicks, it takes away $78,800 per month, or $945,000 per year. The financial reports for Q2 2026 show the same gap: Catena Media’s NDC rose by 23%, but their revenue fell by 1%; on the other hand, Better Collective’s NDC increased by 24%, and their revenue grew by 9%.

Clicks That Are No Longer There: What Was Measured

A lot has been written about AI Overviews, but few effects have been measured. There are three of them, and they all share one limitation: they are based on informational queries.

In April 2025, Ahrefs analyzed 300,000 keywords from Google Search Console, looking at March 2024 compared to March 2025. For queries featuring an AI Overview, the click-through rate (CTR) for the top spot fell from 0.073 to 0.026. When factoring in the overall trend, the effect of AI Overviews was estimated to be around −34.5%. In February 2026, the research was carried out again over a two-year span, looking at December 2023 alongside December 2025: the click-through rate for the top spot on queries featuring AI Overviews dropped from 0.073 to 0.016, while it was expected to be 0.037 without AI Overviews. The outcome showed about a 58% drop. For informational questions that didn’t include AI Overviews, the CTR also went down: from 0.076 to 0.039.

In November 2025, Seer Interactive released findings on 3,119 informational queries across 42 organizations, amounting to 25.1 million organic impressions from June 2024 to September 2025. The organic CTR for queries featuring AI Overview plummeted from 1.76% to 0.61%, while for those that lacked AI Overview, it dropped from 2.72% to 1.62%. The paid CTR on queries with an AI Overview fell from 19.7% to 6.34%. Sites cited by AI Overview received 35% more organic clicks; however, the authors pointed out that they can’t confirm a cause-and-effect relationship.

In July 2025, the Pew Research Center took a look at what 900 Americans were doing online: there were 68,879 searches, and 12,593 of those had an AI summary included. Users clicked links in 8% of visits with an AI summary versus 15% without one; additionally, they clicked on links within the summary just 1% of the time. After checking out a page that had an AI summary, 26% of people ended their session, while that number was only 16% for others.

Google’s stance is a bit different. On August 6, 2025, Liz Reid, Google’s VP and Head of Search, noted that “total organic click volume from Google Search to websites has been relatively stable year-over-year,” and that “quality” clicks were, if anything, “slightly more” numerous. At the same time, she acknowledged that traffic is being redistributed: “decreased traffic to some sites and increased traffic to others”. For a review site, the important question is: which group does it fit into?

Branded vs. Non-Branded: How Far AI Overviews Have Spread

Just a year back, people thought branded searches were a secure area. In November 2025, Ahrefs discovered that AI Overviews appeared in 13.1% of branded queries versus 24.9% of non-branded ones. A Seer study of 1,122 branded queries through mid-2025 found AI Overviews on 4.9% of branded versus 12.4% of non-branded queries. Semrush tracked 200,000 keywords and recorded a rise in navigational queries that included AI Overviews, jumping from 0.74% in January to 10.33% by October 2025. Commercial inquiries increased from 8.15% to 18.57%, while transactional queries grew from 1.98% to 13.94%.

Things looked different in 2026. Based on Ahrefs data published on October 2, 2026 – during their 232.8 million checks of US desktop search results from July to September – AI Overviews showed up in 61.3% of branded searches in July, 65.1% in August, and then jumped to 73.3% in September. By September 29, it reached 82.91%. The difference with non-branded queries shrank from 12.2 percentage points in July 2026 to 5 percentage points in September 2026. In a panel of 100 Interbrand brands, an AI Overview showed up for 63 exact brand names, which is a jump from just 5 at the start of July. Plus, in 48 of those 63 cases (76.2%), it took the top spot.

It matters whom the AI Overview cites. In that same panel, Wikipedia appeared in 71.9% of blocks that had sources, whereas YouTube showed up in 38.6% and LinkedIn in 22.8%. A competing brand’s site appeared once across 57 source lists. For a review site, this isn’t good news: searching for phrases like “bet365 review” or “888 casino bonus” is now likely to bring up a top block made from Wikipedia, YouTube, and the operator’s own content instead of an affiliate review. The Ahrefs panel consists of brands from Best Global Brands, not casinos; no one has published exact shares for gambling, and that’s the first thing you need to check using your own data.

What Publicly Listed Affiliates Are Revealing

You can already see the effects in financial reports. In the second quarter of 2026, several publicly listed affiliates simultaneously reported more new depositors, while revenue grew more slowly or fell.

Table 1. Public affiliates, Q2 2026. *Quarterly revenue ÷ quarterly NDC, calculated by 15M; includes RevShare from older cohorts, sponsorships, and other revenue, so it does not equal the price per NDC. Sources: 1–9.

The gap between depositors and revenue has two explanations. The first is revenue mix. At Better Collective, of the €58 million in the Publishing segment, €30.9 million was generated through RevShare and €12.2 million from sponsorships. It was sponsorships that delivered the +44%, while CPA in North America jumped by 50% due to prediction markets. Search takes on a supporting role in this narrative instead of being a key player: the report says the Publishing audience “mainly comes from direct traffic and organic search results,” and separately accounts for a −€2 million effect from the rise in the UK’s Remote Gaming Duty from 21% to 40%, starting April 1.

The second is click quality. Catena Media, pulling in 97% of its revenue from North America, saw its NDC rise by 23%, even though its revenue dipped by 1%. CEO Manuel Stan shared the outcome in a press release on August 11, pointing to “industry-wide headwinds in organic search”. He made the objective clear: “offsetting our exposure to Google traffic” – through the PlayPerks loyalty program on PlayUSA.com. In an AffPapa review, Catena’s point is captured even more simply: the same spot in search results brings in fewer clicks.

Grandstand, which used to be Gambling.com Group, gave the most candid breakdown. Marketing revenue dropped by 10% to $26.5 million, and the company pointed to a fall in SEO income as the reason; according to the earnings call, non-SEO channels now make up two-thirds of the marketing revenue. The price of diversification: the cost of goods sold jumped 119% to $5.9 million, whereas adjusted EBITDA dropped 44% to $7.7 million. “Our business is significantly more diversified than at any other time in our 20-year history,” said CEO Kevin McCrystle. The company maintained its full-year guidance of $165–170 million.

Funnel: What We Know About the Journey from Visit to FTD

No public affiliate shares the conversion rate from visits to FTD. Better Collective shares details on NDC and deposit volume, Gentoo puts out FTD figures, and Catena reveals their NDC numbers, yet none of these companies mention traffic stats. Therefore, the model has to be built on vendor benchmarks, with a caveat: the methodology and sample are not disclosed.

Track360, a platform for tracking affiliates, released its “2026 Ranges” for regulated online casinos in June 2026, showing a click-to-registration conversion rate of 8–15%, a registration-to-FTD conversion rate of 25–45%, and an overall click-to-qualified player conversion rate of 0.8–4.4%. In the vendor’s section on education, the ranges are wider: 2–8% and 20–45%. Track360 puts the cost per acquisition for a first-time deposit in Tier 1 (UK, Germany, Canada) at around $150–350 for casinos and $100–280 for sportsbooks.

There’s no available data on the third aspect – the share of visits to a review site that leads to an operator referral. For the model, 15M uses 30%: this is an assumption, not a measurement. Each of the three coefficients needs to be replaced with your own stats; the formula stays the same.

15M Calculation: 100,000 Visits per Month

Base scenario: a casino review site in Tier 1 getting 100,000 organic visits monthly. 30% of those visits click through to the operator, 10% of those clicks turn into registrations (the midpoint of the Track360 range), and 35% of the registrations convert to FTDs. Payment stands at a $250 CPA for each FTD, placing it within the vendor’s Tier-1 range of $150–350. Alternatively, there’s a 30% RevShare option, based on a player generating $300 in NGR for the operator within the first year. The “−30%” scenario means losing 30% of organic clicks while keeping the same conversion rates. The “−58%” scenario takes Ahrefs’ estimate for queries containing an AI Overview and applies it to the total traffic of the site.

Table 2. FTD economics model for a review site, 15M calculation. Conversion and CPA ranges come from Track360 vendor data (sources 17, 18); 30% of visits lead to clicks out to the operator, while NGR per player sits at $300 – these figures are 15M assumptions. Estimate: −58% – Ahrefs, February 2026 (source 10).

From the table, we can take away three points. First: with a CPA model, traffic loss turns into lost revenue one-to-one: a 30% loss of clicks on 100,000 visits is almost $1 million a year. Second: to make up for a 30% decrease in traffic, the visit-to-FTD conversion rate has to go up from 1.05% to 1.5% – that’s a 43% boost; for a 58% drop, it needs to hit 2.5% – meaning 8.3% FTD per click-out at the same click-out share, surpassing Track360’s end-to-end span of 0.8–4.4%. Third: RevShare in the first year of a cohort brings in roughly a third of what CPA does (just 36% of the CPA revenue), but there’s a lasting impact – Better Collective and Gentoo have noted record deposit volumes, much of which is from older cohorts: €836 million and €207 million per quarter. For a site that is losing new traffic, the RevShare base acts as its sole safety net.

Why Branded Traffic Hits the Model Harder

The averaged 30% hides the structure. On a review site, searches like “{operator} review” and “{operator} bonus code” have historically converted better than non-branded ones. This is because the user has already picked a brand and is now searching for a link or a promo code. If we assume they make up 40% of visits and convert to FTD twice as effectively as others (15M estimate), they represent roughly 57% of the site’s FTDs. In 2026, these are the queries that placed an AI Overview at the top spot in about three-quarters of the instances when that block showed up.

Two factors come together here. Google assembles a branded block from Wikipedia, YouTube, and the operator’s own material – like its pages on promotions, terms, and support. Operators have put years into creating their own content for branded search queries, and now AI Overview has finished this task: the answer to the question “What bonus does X offer?” is now given by X itself and the encyclopedia, which makes the affiliate redundant in this chain. Non-branded searches such as “best online casino canada” are faring better at the moment – AI Overview struggles to answer them without drawing comparisons, which means review sites continue to be a resource. But even then, as Semrush points out, the portion of commercial searches that included AI Overview jumped from 8.15% to 18.57% in 2025.

This changes priorities. The brand-SEO approach for affiliates – building a page for each operator and every promo code – becomes the most vulnerable asset in the portfolio instead of being the most dependable. In a related article on Gambling SEO, 15M explains[a] how to rebuild content after AI Overviews; the main takeaway here is clear: when figuring out P&L, brand pages should be discounted more heavily than the average 30%.

What Public Players Do

The message of the Q2 2026 reports is the same: move away from dependence on search, and every company pays a price for it. Grandstand raised non-SEO to two-thirds of marketing revenue, but this came with a 119% rise in cost of sales and a 44% decrease in adjusted EBITDA. Better Collective grew sponsorship revenue in Publishing by 44%, reaching €12.2 million, and saw a 50% jump in CPA in North America, thanks to prediction markets; its EBITDA margin increased to 30%. Catena is building a loyalty program to bring users back directly. Gentoo Media, which saw its FTDs and deposits rise even as revenue dropped by 9%, has lowered its guidance by €8–15 million and is looking at refinancing options.

The shared point here: none of them disputes Google’s figures on “stable” click volume. They have simply stopped counting on it.

What This Means

To affiliates. Calculate FTD economics by segment, not by site. Apply a bigger discount to brand pages: with 40% branded traffic and double the conversion, they deliver more than half of FTDs, and they are the first to get an AI Overview in the first position. Check the three metrics from Table 2 with your own data – the share of visits that click out to the operator, the conversion rate from clicks to registrations, and the rate of registrations turning into first-time deposits. If end-to-end conversion is below 1%, a 30% traffic loss means a change of model, not optimization.

To operators. Growth in affiliates’ NDCs while their revenue falls is a signal that acquisition pricing will be revised. An affiliate that is losing branded traffic will either request a higher CPA for non-branded traffic or move to a hybrid model that includes RevShare. For operators who have solid branded content, this is the time when some branded FTDs come back without earning a commission; it’s important to figure out just how much that amounts to.

To investors. Look not at NDCs but at revenue per NDC and the share of RevShare. At Better Collective, 70% of NDCs come through RevShare and VoD is at a record €836 million; at Catena, revenue per NDC is €383, but 97% of revenue comes from one region. An affiliate’s multiple in 2026 is determined not by traffic but by the share of revenue that does not depend on a position in Google.

Methodology

As of November 4, 2026. Company data comes from Q2 2026 (April–June) reports and press releases, in each company’s reporting currency. Revenue per NDC in Table 1 is a 15M calculation: quarterly revenue divided by quarterly NDCs or FTDs; the metric includes revenue from older cohorts and non-affiliate items and is meant only for comparing companies with each other. The model in Table 2 is a 15M calculation based on assumptions: a 30% click-out rate and $300 NGR per player over 12 months are 15M estimates with no external source; the 10% and 35% conversion rates are midpoints of the Track360 ranges (vendor data with no disclosed methodology). The CTR-decline estimates (Ahrefs, Seer, Pew) come from informational queries; applying them to commercial gambling queries is an assumption that should be tested against your own Search Console data. The 40% branded share and its doubled conversion are illustrative assumptions.

Sources

1. Better Collective, “Q2 Report 2026”, August 20, 2026 — revenue of €89 million, 373,000 NDCs (+24%), 70% through RevShare, VoD of €836 million, Publishing revenue of €58 million and a 29% margin, UK RGD increasing from 21% to 40%. https://bettercollective.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Q2-2026-Report-Better-Collective-1.pdf
2. Better Collective, “Better Collective reports Q2 2026”, August 20, 2026 — press release and CEO quote. https://www.inderes.se/en/releases/better-collective-reports-q2-2026
3. Gentoo Media, “Gentoo Media publishes Q2 2026 interim report and revises full-year guidance”, August 26, 2026 — €22.9 million, 101,900 FTDs, VoD of €207 million, and guidance of €97–100 million. https://www.inderes.dk/en/releases/gentoo-media-plc-gentoo-media-publishes-q2-2026-interim-report-and-revises-full-year-guidance

[a]Поставить ссылку на статью про SEO после AI Overviews