A survey of 900 US Google users: of ~69K searches, 18% gave AI Overviews; of those, users clicked a link 8% of the time, compared to 15% with no AI summary
Last year, Google introduced “AI Overviews,” a feature that displays an artificial intelligence-generated result summary at the top of many Google search pages.
Pew Research Center
Context & Ripple Effects
Google moved AI Overviews from a planned US rollout to broader international availability, after earlier measurements found the feature on a meaningful share of UK and US queries. The new user-level survey adds evidence about what happens after the summary is displayed, rather than just how often it appears.
The finding also lands after Google began placing ads in mobile AI Overviews, making the answer layer a more central part of the search-results page and raising the stakes for traffic that previously flowed to external results.
First-order effects
For searches in the survey that displayed an AI Overview, external links received an 8% click-through rate, versus 15% when no AI summary appeared. That is an observed association in this sample, not proof that the overview alone caused the difference.
Sites that depend on Google referrals face less immediate opportunity to earn a visit on queries where the summary satisfies the user before they select a result.
Second-order effects
Publishers and other search-dependent businesses may put more weight on whether their content is cited or surfaced within AI answers, while seeking audiences through channels they control; this sharpens the case for publisher controls over AI search use.
Google can continue concentrating more of the search journey in its own results interface, while advertisers and publishers must assess the value of visibility in an answer-led page rather than a conventional list of links.
Third-order effects
If lower outbound clicking persists as AI summaries expand, search distribution could shift from sending users to the open web toward Google mediating answers and downstream actions—a stronger global expansion of AI Overviews would make that shift more consequential.
The durable tension will be between Google’s AI-led search experience and content providers’ ability to capture traffic, attribution, and economic value from the material that informs those answers.
The trend: AI search is evolving from a retrieval interface into an answer layer, potentially reducing the share of queries that produce outbound web visits.
It is mind boggling to me that so much of AI search is predicated on the now very real observable fact that most people seem to not care or even be able tell that they're just being fed garbage that can often be wrong and then leaving Google immediately. www.platformer.news/googl…
A Pew study of 900 U.S. adults confirms the obvious: people click less when AI overviews answer their questions on Google. It's no longer if web traffic and ad revenue will drop, it's by how much. — The real question now is how small does the web get?
Remember when Google's CEO argued last year that people would actually click through AI links more, despite that not making any sense or being supported by any data? Turns out he was wrong — 2024: www.searchenginejournal.com/google- ceo-a.... Today: www.pewresearch.org/short-…
Pew just dropped the data: AI summaries on Google are killing clicks to news sites. — Translation? Tech platforms are strip-mining journalism for training data and audience reach—leaving publishers out of the loop. — 📎 www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/ ... #AIandMedia #Platf…
> Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results — www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/ ... I sure as fuck do not, and I am annoyed Duck Duck Go is pulling that shit off too. I keep having to turn it off. — #AISlop #tech #Google #fail
tbh the AI overview crap on Google is awful but even duckduckgo has the problem of giving you what appear to be legitimate search results but when you click on the site it's clear and obvious AI slop. there's so many of these fake slop sites clogging up everything
I think it highlights the huge shift in who/what people *trust* to provide news. Many ‘trust’ Google enough to settle for an AI overview for anything not actually really important to them personally. Youtube and TikTok have become a source of ‘news’ for many too, not to mention…
I switched to Ducksuckgo. It's not bad. But it can be quite literal. I do like not seeing the Google AI search overview though, I hated seeing that when I was searching.
I had a thought, I see the main argument about the “AI overview” in Google being that it's often inaccurate, but also... isn't it actually stealing traffic from websites? Sometimes I see it has the same exact wording, mashed together from websites that appear in the first search…
there is something very apropos about posting this as a screenshot without a link to the Pew data, but that's here: www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/ ...) [embedded post]
This AI overview format is the worst possible outcome for publishers, it only benefits Google. 1. The answer displays prominently at the top with citations only visible once clicked (unlikely) 2. No impressions show in GSC after the search - decoupling concerns mitigated [image]
Google shows AI overviews ~20% of the time & when they do visitors click on links from results 46% less. A big drop & the amount of folks exposed to AI driven search results will only increase when Google rolls out AI Mode later this year. [image]
The AI overview is also frequently just plain wrong, just confidently off the mark on the most basic details of a Google search. I cannot believe how many people blindly trust it and other AI tools. We're absolutely cooked on media literacy and basic critical thinking right now
As soon as Google started rolling out March 2025 Core Update it sort of opened the door for showing more of AI Overviews for targeted queries of this site and since then it has gone from showing AI overviews for almost 1 million to now close to 2 million. I wonder what their [ima…
nerd alert but one realm where google ai overview is almost useless is video game guides...if you want to find some obscure equipment or need to know the pre-requisites for a nuanced side quest, google compiles articles and reddit comments and spits out info that is often wrong
Surprising no one, new research says AI Overviews cause massive drop in search clicks | The Pew Research Center analysis shows how hard AI is hitting web traffic.