Are AI Overviews Killing the PBN Business Model

A new website, a full rebrand and a new onslaught of people trying to sell me ‘links’ and content’ on LinkedIn. I’m trying to be polite in my own Scottish way but do me a favour; "gonnae no dae that," you’re wasting your time (and mine). You’re 3 years out of date and here’s why.

Are AI Overviews Killing the PBN Business Model?

For close to two decades, private blog networks have been one of SEO's worst-kept secrets. Build (or buy) a cluster of "independent" sites, cross-link them into a money site, and watch the rankings climb. It's grey-hat, it's against Google's guidelines, and for a long time, it worked.

So, here's the question worth asking in 2026: with AI Overviews now sitting at the top of so many search results, are people actually using PBNs less? And if so, can we put a number on it?

The short answer is yes but it may not the number you'd expect.

There's no PBN census, and there never will be

Nobody publishes a "PBN adoption index." There’s no surprise there.

These networks are deliberately obscured with hidden ownership, offshore hosting, footprint-masking by design. Nobody running one is filling in a survey about it. So if you're looking for a chart that shows "PBN usage, 2023 vs 2026," it doesn't exist and it isn't coming. I did try to find one.

What does exist, and what tells the real story, is data on what's happening to the clicks PBNs were built to capture.

The traffic PBNs depend on is disappearing

PBNs have always been aimed at a specific target: informational queries and softer commercial searches where a network of "authoritative" sites can nudge rankings without the scrutiny that competitive, high-value terms attract. That's precisely the territory AI Overviews have moved into first and hardest.

We’ve all seen the stats and give take a few % on the points they are saying the same thing.

• SparkToro and Datos have found that roughly 65% of Google searches now end without any click at all.
• When an AI Overview is present on the page, that zero-click rate climbs to around 83%.
• A field experiment out of Carnegie Mellon and the Indian School of Business measured a 38% drop in organic clicks on queries where an AI Overview appeared.
• Ahrefs' review of some 300,000 keywords found the position-1 organic listing loses roughly 58% of its expected clicks when an AI Overview sits above it — up sharply from about 34.5% the previous year.
• Pew Research has put the figure even more starkly for AIO pages specifically: only around 8% of users go on to click an organic result underneath one.
• One large-scale crawl of Search Console data pegged the year-on-year click loss for informational queries at roughly 61%.

Every one of those numbers describes exactly the query territory PBNs were engineered to win.

Inference, not measurement — but a reasonably solid one

You can't measure PBN usage directly, but you can measure whether the economics still make sense, and increasingly they don't.

The ROI has quietly collapsed. If the informational and low-intent commercial queries a PBN was built to rank for have lost anywhere from a quarter to two-thirds of their click-through potential, the payoff for building or maintaining that network shrinks right along with it.

People inside the PBN world are saying so themselves. Publications aimed squarely at that audience have started openly discussing the erosion of organic click volume and the need to rethink the model so it’s not exactly the tone you'd expect if business were booming. Estimates of AI Overview presence on informational queries now run as high as 89%, and those impressions are converting to outbound clicks at a fraction of the old rate.

Zero-click search removes the incentive at the root. There's not much point spending months building link equity toward a ranking that, four times out of five, produces no visit at all.

The industry's attention has visibly shifted elsewhere. PBNs didn’t change, the rules did. Growth in citation engineering, entity authority building, comprehensive schema markup, and brand-query optimisation all point the same direction: away from manipulating links and toward making content legible to LLMs and AI answer engines in the first place.

What the numbers look like by query type

The categories PBNs were purpose-built for are exactly the ones losing the most ground.

So, is it measurable?

Not as a raw count of active PBNs because that number was never going to be public. But as a measure of viability, the decline is about as clear as SEO data gets: click-through collapses of 30–60% depending on query type, zero-click rates pushing past 80% when an AI Overview is present, and position-1 CTR cut nearly in half.

That makes this a leading indicator, not a lagging one. The shift is well underway for a few years now; the data just confirms it.

So, what's replacing the old playbook of using the PBNs? Entity authority. Structured data. Becoming the source AI systems actually cite.

That's a story for another post.