Google's AI Overviews Significantly Reduce Website Clicks, New Study Reveals

Surprising no one, new research says AI Overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

Google's search results have undergone a seismic shift over the past year as AI fever has continued to escalate among the tech giants. Nowhere is this change more apparent than right at the top of Google's storied results page, which is now home to AI Overviews. Google contends these Gemini-based answers don't take traffic away from websites, but a new analysis from the Pew Research Center says otherwise. Its analysis shows that searches with AI summaries reduce clicks, and their prevalence is increasing. Google began testing AI Overviews as the "search generative experience" in May 2023, and just a year later, they were an official part of the search engine results page (SERP). Many sites (including this one) have noticed changes to their traffic in the wake of this move, but Google has brushed off concerns about how this could affect the sites from which it collects all that data. SEO experts have disagreed with Google's stance on how AI affects web traffic, and the newly released Pew study backs them up. The Pew Research Center analyzed data from 900 users of the Ipsos KnowledgePanel collected in March 2025. The analysis shows that among the test group, users were much less likely to click on search results when the page included an AI Overview. Pew reports that searches without an AI answer resulted in a click rate of 15 percent. On SERPs with AI Overviews, the rate of clicks to other sites drops by almost half, to 8 percent. Google has also, on several occasions, claimed that people click on the links cited in AI Overviews, but Pew found that just 1 percent of AI Overviews produced a click on a source. These sources are most frequently Wikipedia, YouTube, and Reddit, which collectively account for 15 percent of all AI sources.

People Click Links Less Frequently When AI Summary Appears on Google Search, Study Shows

Imad is a senior reporter covering Google and internet culture. Hailing from Texas, Imad started his journalism career in 2013 and has amassed bylines with The New York Times, The Washington Post, ESPN, Tom's Guide and Wired, among others. Google's AI Overviews, which are AI-generated summaries that appear at the top of search results for certain types of queries, are less likely to lead to clicks for sites, according to a report from Pew Research on Tuesday. The study is based on data from 900 US adults who shared their browsing data with Pew. Based on the study's findings, when an AI overview -- AIO -- appeared in search, users were less likely to click on links when compared to queries that didn't generate AI summaries. Pew took data from the month of March and monitored the URLs users visited on a tracked device. It used a third-party web scraping service to run the same search and collect all the text that appeared on a Google search page, including links and AI-generated summaries. Of the 68,879 unique searches, 12,593 produced an AIO, which is about 18%. Pew then looked at which URL was visited after a user made a query to analyze where people were ultimately clicking: leaving Google to browse a different site or ending their browsing session entirely. Pew found that when an AIO appeared in Search, users clicked on a traditional link in Google Search (not in the AI Overview) 8% of the time, but when an AIO didn't appear, the click rate jumped to 15%. Interestingly, Pew found that only 1% of searches resulted in users clicking on links found within the AIO summary. "The goal of our study was to gain a better understanding of how people encounter and interact with AI-generated search summaries," Athena Chapekis, a Pew Research computational social science analyst who worked on the study, told CNET in a statement. "This analysis is a snapshot of what real Google users are doing in their day-to-day browsing." When an AIO does appear, nearly two-thirds of users either jumped to a different site or closed their Google Search page entirely, suggesting AI-generated results satisfy the search needs of users. Interestingly, Google's AIOs tend to cite Wikipedia, Reddit and YouTube most frequently, accounting for a collective 15% of the sources found in AI summaries that Pew looked at. Government sources also rank high in AIO, accounting for 6% of the sources linked in AI Overviews that Pew examined. This could be because Wikipedia and government sources are non-profit, don't have the same publisher demands and are considered trustworthy. Google also owns YouTube, which ends up driving traffic to one of its core online products. And Google did ink a reported multi-million dollar AI deal with Reddit this year to use its data for AI training. Reddit also gained increased prominence in Google Search in the past few years. Thanks to AI, people's search habits are changing as well. Instead of searching via keywords, more people are searching with intent and with entire sentences. In instances of longer search queries, it more often triggered an AIO. "People are gravitating to AI-powered experiences, and AI features in Search enable people to ask even more questions, creating new opportunities for people to connect with websites," a Google spokesperson said in a statement. "This study uses a flawed methodology and skewed queryset that is not representative of Search traffic. We consistently direct billions of clicks to websites daily and have not observed significant drops in aggregate web traffic as is being suggested." The publishing industry is facing major headwinds with drops in traffic across the internet. 2025 is already becoming a brutal year for journalism, with layoffs at CNN, Vox Media, HuffPost, LA Times and NBC. Nearly 10,000 journalists have been laid off in the past three years, according to Nieman Reports. Online publishers also rely heavily on Google Search for traffic, which controls nearly 90% of the global online search market, according to GlobalStats. A judge declared that Google was operating an illegal monopoly in online search last year, and a federal court declared earlier this year that Google's online ads business is also an illegal monopoly. AI-generated summaries at the top of Google have been blamed in part for online publishers' recent traffic turmoil, although it's been difficult to definitively prove, as Google doesn't provide clear data on what traffic comes via AIOs in Search Console, a backend for sites to see Google Search metrics. Google in the past has argued that, despite the drops in search traffic, AI Overviews bring "higher quality clicks," meaning those with higher search intent who tend to stay on sites longer. Google hasn't provided any data to back this, however.

Few People Are Clicking Past Google's 'AI Overviews' Search Results

New research suggests that few Google users are exploring beyond the AI-generated overviews the search engine now produces for many web searches. The Pew Research Center finds that among users presented with one of these AI summaries, which first appeared in 2023 as Search Generative Experiences before a rebrand to AI Overviews last year, further browsing is now much less frequent. * Only 8% clicked on a link in the search results, versus 15% among those shown search results without an AI Overview; * 26% ended their browsing at the AI Overview, while 16% did so after getting traditional search results; * 32% continued to search Google, a bit under the 35% who searched on after getting older-school search results. Pew analyzed the web habits of 900 survey participants who accepted having their March 2025 browsing activity tracked. The nonprofit's report also looked into the links shown first in AI Overviews and in regular searches and found some interesting divergences. * Google's own YouTube (which now shows AI Overview results to Premium subscribers) appears in the first page in 8% of traditional results but only got a mention in the first three AI Overview links in 4% of those results. * The proportions reversed with Wikipedia, with 3% of standard search results having a first-page link to the user-generated encyclopedia (which itself recently halted a rollout of AI summaries) but 6% of AI Overviews including it in their first three links. * AI Overviews were even more favorable to government sites at the .gov domain (some of which now offer their own AI chatbots), with 6% of those summaries pointing to those sites in their first three links; only 2% of traditional results had .gov links in the first page. * Reddit and news sites, however, showed up in 5% of each type of search result except for standard results, where Reddit (guess what, it's also testing AI search assistance) got a link in the first page 6% of the time. But while the majority of users in Pew's analysis had seen AI Overview results, only 18% of their total searches yielded an automated summary. Queries in the form of who/what/when/why questions, however, led to AI Overviews 60% of the time, while sentence-style queries with a noun and a verb got that automated response 36% of the time. Google questioned the notion that AI Overviews depress clickthrough traffic. "This study uses a flawed methodology and skewed queryset that is not representative of Search traffic," emailed Jennifer Kutz, a Google spokesperson. "We consistently direct billions of clicks to websites daily and have not observed significant drops in aggregate web traffic as is being suggested." Many publishers would beg to differ. The Wall Street Journal reported in June that a variety of publications, including Business Insider and the Washington Post, have seen steep and sustained drops in search traffic. (The WSJ's own search traffic stayed roughly the same.) At Google's I/O developer conference in May, company executives said AI Overviews increased search use, citing 10% growth resulting from them in the US and India. And in a press preview before that event, search VP Liz Reid said AI Overview clickthroughs are "higher-quality," meaning that "people spend more time on those web sites." Google has not shared more detailed data to back that up, and Pew publicist Sogand Afkari said that its research did not cover post-clickthrough dwell time at destination sites. Pew's study also did not cover a newer form of AI search that Google is now deploying, conversational "AI Mode" results. So, further rounds of this debate over AI's effect on search traffic seem as inescapable as AI itself.

Google AI Overviews are killing the web: Pew study

Summarizing online content is good for the search giant, not so much for publishers ai-pocalypse Google Search users are less likely to click on search result links when those pages have AI Overviews, according to the Pew Research Center. And the presence of those AI Overviews - summaries distilled from AI models trained on web content - on search results pages makes it more likely web users will end their browsing session. The findings give further weight to prior reports that Google's use of AI to recap the content on websites is depriving those websites of visitor traffic and corresponding ad revenue. The non-profit Pew Research Center on Tuesday published a study based on data from 900 US adults who agreed to share their web browsing activity with researchers. Of those, 58 percent conducted at least one search in March 2025 that surfaced an AI-generated query response that Google calls an AI Overview. Google began running AI Overviews regularly in May 2024. When researchers looked at the survey participants' data, they found that the presence of an AI Overview on a search results page made searchers nearly half as likely to click on search links, compared to pages without AI Overviews. Those who did not encounter an AI summary clicked on a search result nearly twice as often "Users who encountered an AI summary clicked on a traditional search result link in 8 percent of all visits," explained Athena Chapekis, data science analyst for the Pew Research Center, in the online post. "Those who did not encounter an AI summary clicked on a search result nearly twice as often (15 percent of visits)." Google includes links to source material summarized via AI Overviews, but searchers are even less likely to click on those links - just one percent did so. As if to reduce that percentage further, Google recently added backlinks to its own search results within AI Overviews, alongside the link anchors pointing to source websites. When AI Overviews do appear on search results pages - on 1 in 5 searches, roughly - Google users are more likely to end their browsing session, according to the Pew study. The session conclusion rate was 26 percent when an AI Overview was present, compared to 16 percent when the page contained only traditional search results. This is a notable change from October 2024, when AI Overviews showed no significant impact on search referral traffic. Concern about Google profiting from publisher content without sharing valuable web traffic has forced a reexamination of the search-based advertising business that has largely fueled the web economy. Web-based publications clearly have a self-interested opinion, with headlines like "Google Is Burying the Web Alive", "AI is killing the web. Can anything save it?", or our own take on the subject, "The AIpocalypse is here for websites as search referrals plunge." It's not clear yet whether a viable alternative business model will emerge, but experimentation has begun. Earlier this month, Cloudflare proposed the creation of toll taking infrastructure for AI crawlers in an effort to help publishers. For its part, Chocolate Factory claims that AI Overviews are helpful in guiding users to a wider variety of material online. In documentation for developers, Google says, "AI Overviews help people get to the gist of a complicated topic or question more quickly, and provide a jumping off point to explore links to learn more. They were designed to show up on queries where they can add additional benefits beyond what people might already get on Search. With AI Overviews, people have been visiting a greater diversity of websites for help with more complex questions." Note that Google does not say "more people" are navigating away from Google to visit this more diverse set of websites. And the site diversity may be a reflection of common queries to popular websites being answered more frequently on Google.com. That's what the Pew study suggests. The search biz in March said that over 1 billion people have used AI Overviews. Google didn't immediately respond to our request for comment on this story. We note that Google Search will omit AI Overviews if you append "-ai" to the end of a search query or "&udm=14" as a URL parameter added to a search string. DuckDuckGo provides a dedicated URL for avoiding AI. Bing's switch to disable AI in search results is said to be broken. ®

Google's AI Overviews cut link clicks by almost 50%, putting independent sites at risk

In a nutshell: Google has long contended that its AI Overviews (AIO), which appear at the top of certain search results, don't take clicks away from websites. This is, of course, not true. And a new study proves it. The Pew Research Center analyzed the browsing habits of 900 US adults who are members of the Ipsos KnowledgePanel for a month. The bottom line is that users are much less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in search results. According to the findings, around 6 in 10 people visited a search page with an AI-generated summary. 13% visited the website of a generative AI tool, and 10% searched for an AI-related term. Of the 68,879 unique searches during the study, 12,593, or around 18%, produced an AIO. In searches without an AIO summary, users clicked on a traditional link in Google Search - not within the AI Overview - 15% of the time. When results include an AIO, that figure is almost halved to 8%. Google often argues that people click on links within an AIO, sending them to the site where the information has been sourced, such as Wikipedia, YouTube, and Reddit, which account for around 15% of all AIO sources Pew examined. But this happened in just 1% of cases. What's also concerning for websites is that more people ended their browsing session when an AIO appeared, suggesting they did not wish to check multiple sites for extra information - and to confirm that what the AI generated wasn't a fabricated hallucination. The Pew Center says 1 in 5 searches now show AI Overviews, and Google is increasing the number of searches in which the AIO appear. Questions and longer search queries are more likely to produce these summaries. It was found that 60% of questions and 36% of full-sentence searches generated one. We're seeing more stories about how AI and zero-click searches are killing the business model of the web that has sustained content creators for the last 15+ years. Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince sounded a warning in May, and we covered the situation in depth last October. While some will argue that being able to find an answer quickly and from multiple sources without clicking through several sites is easier and more convenient, there are obvious problems. Beyond the hallucinations, smaller independent websites - especially those that AI companies don't partner with - aren't going to want to create new content when they get paid nothing or almost nothing for doing so. Like a snake eating its tail, we could end up with only a handful of massive, corporation-owned sites - visited by fewer and fewer people - that make most of their money from AI companies paying to scrape their content.

AI Overviews lead to fewer clicked links, study finds as web traffic falls - Google disagrees

Google Search has been going all-in on AI over the past few years, but it seems like that's not really benefitting anyone but the user as a new study shows that searches with AI Overviews are more likely to see fewer clicked links out of Google, and also fewer further searches within Google. Data from Pew Research Center shows that AI Overviews have a pretty big influence over user behavior in Google Search compared to traditional search results. The study, analyzing data from 900 US adults earlier this year, reveals that searches with AI Overviews are less likely to lead to further Google searches, while also significantly dropping the number of links clicked. A few key points here include: Those initial points line up with complaints from publishers in recent months, as many have noticed significant drops in traffic coming from Search. Google, meanwhile, has repeatedly mentioned how it "prominently" shows links, but this study seems to show that people just are not clicking them. Google, responding to the study, told The Register and others that "people are gravitating" towards AI features in Search and disputes Pew's methodology. People are gravitating to AI-powered experiences, and AI features in Search enable people to ask even more questions, creating new opportunities for people to connect with websites. This study uses a flawed methodology and skewed queryset that is not representative of Search traffic. We consistently direct billions of clicks to websites daily and have not observed significant drops in aggregate web traffic as is being suggested. To Google's last point, The Economist recently highlighted data from SimilarWeb that shows "traffic to more than 100m web domains, estimates that worldwide search traffic (by humans) fell by about 15% in the year to June [2025]." That's pretty significant. Google, in that same article, reiterated that it has not noticed a "dramatic decline" in outbound clicks, but wouldn't share data. Again, the study from Pew seems to suggest that, yes, there is quite a major decline in outbound clicks when AI Overviews are used, at least looking at its limited data set. While AI Overviews continue to have a major impact on publishers and the web as a whole, Google's rebuttal around users "gravitating" towards it AI features seems true. Creative Strategies CEO Ben Bajarin shared data that showed that 66% of survey respondents found Google's AI Mode - now widely available - more helpful than traditional Search, and these users apparently knew the difference between AI Mode and Overviews. Publishers previously called AI Mode the "definition of theft." What do you think of AI Overviews and Google's other AI-powered changes to Search? Have they changed your usage? Let us know!

AI summaries causing 'devastating' drop in online news audiences, study finds

Exclusive: Analysis found that sites previously ranked first can lose up to 79% of traffic if results are displayed below a Google AI Overview News companies have been warned of a "devastating impact" on online audiences as search results are replaced by AI summaries, after a new study claimed it caused up to 80% fewer clickthroughs. The threat posed by Google's AI Overviews, which summarise a search result with a block of text, has rapidly risen to the top of the concerns among media owners. Some regard it as an existential threat to outlets reliant on search result traffic. AI summaries can give users all the information they seek without ever clicking through to the original source of the content. Meanwhile, search result links are pushed further down the page, lowering the number of users that find them out. A new analysis by the Authoritas analytics company has found that a site previously ranked first in a search result could lose about 79% of its traffic for that query if results were delivered below an AI overview. The study also found links to YouTube - owned by Google's parent company Alphabet - were more prominent compared with the normal search result system. The research has been submitted as part of a legal complaint to the UK's competition watchdog about the impact of Google AI Overviews. A Google spokesperson said in a statement the study was "inaccurate and based on flawed assumptions and analysis", using outdated estimations and a set of searches that did not represent all the queries that would generate traffic for news websites. "People are gravitating to AI-powered experiences, and AI features in search enable people to ask even more questions, creating new opportunities for websites to be discovered," the spokesperson said. "We continue to send billions of clicks to websites every day, and we have not seen dramatic drops in aggregate web traffic as is being suggested." A second study also showed a big hit to referral traffic from Google AI Overviews. A month-long survey of almost 69,000 Google searches, run by the Pew Research Center, a US thinktank, found users only clicked a link under an AI summary once every 100 times. A Google spokesperson said that study also used "flawed methodology and skewed queryset that is not representative of search traffic". Senior news executives say Google has repeatedly refused to share the data they need to calculate the impact of the use of AI summaries. While the AI overviews only make up a slice of Google searches, UK publishers have already said they are feeling the effects. The MailOnline executive, Carly Steven, said in May the site was experiencing a large drop in clicks from search results featuring an AI summary - with clickthrough rates dropping by 56.1% on the desktop site and 48.2% on mobiles. The legal complaint to the UK's Competition and Markets Authority is a collaboration between the tech justice group Foxglove, the Independent Publishers Alliance and the Movement for an Open Web. Owen Meredith, the chief executive of the News Media Association, accused Google of trying to keep users "within its own walled garden, taking and monetising valuable content - including news - created by the hard work of others". "The situation as it stands is entirely unsustainable and will ultimately result in the death of quality information online," he said. "The Competition and Markets Authority has the toolkit to tackle these issues. It must do so urgently." Rosa Curling, the director of Foxglove, said the new research demonstrated the "devastating impact that Google's 'AI overviews' are already having on the UK's independent news industry". "It would be bad enough if Google were simply stealing journalists' work and passing it off as their own," she said. "But worse still, they are using this work to fuel their own tools and profits - while making it harder for media outlets to reach the readers they rely on to sustain their work."

Google AI Overviews has devastating impact on website traffic, study says

More research has been published about AI Overviews' effect on declining publisher traffic, athough Google continues to deny it. A study from the Pew Research Center found that the appearance of Google's AI-generated summaries at the top of the search page significantly impacted outbound clicks to other websites. A group of 900 U.S. adults participating in the study agreed to share their browsing activity. Here are some of the findings from the Pew study: The study, which was first published in May and republished earlier this week with additional analysis, echoes what publishers have been saying ever since AI Overviews launched last year. The advent of AI-generated summaries gathered from web data has radically upended the need for users to click to sites in Google search results to find the information they need. That the summaries are sometimes wrong or hallucinated is an entirely different can of worms. Organic search traffic from major news sites including the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The Washington Post has declined according to SimilarWeb data. And smaller, independent sites say the rollout of AI Overviews has forced them to shut down their sites or entirely reinvent their distribution model as a result of declining traffic, according to a Bloomberg report. Other reports from SEO analysts found the presence AI Overviews reduced clicks to sites, compared to traditional search results. Google leadership has repeatedly refuted these claims, saying they have not seen a change in outbound clicks. "For any individual publisher, there's lots of reasons why something could fluctuate," Robby Stein VP of product for Google Search said in a May interview with Mashable. "We don't really look at specific publishers in that way. We think about it really in the aggregate." In an interview with The Verge, CEO Sundar Pichai addressed claims of declining traffic, saying "we are sending traffic to a broader source of people. People may be surfacing more content, looking at more content, so someone may individually see less." In response to the Pew findings, Google told The Register that they believe the study "uses a flawed methodology and skewed queryset that is not representative of Search traffic," before adding "We consistently direct billions of clicks to websites daily and have not observed significant drops in aggregate web traffic as is being suggested."

Google's AI Overviews are cutting off the oxygen to the web

Google's AI Overviews are fundamentally changing how users interact with search results, according to new data from Pew Research Center. Just 8% of users who encountered an AI summary clicked on a traditional link -- half the rate of those who did not. The shift could pose a major threat to publishers and content creators reliant on organic search traffic. Ever since Google first debuted the AI-generated search summaries, web creators have feared the overviews will siphon precious clicks and upend a search experience publishers have relied upon for years. Now, it seems they have their proof. According to a new study from the Pew Research Center, Google users who are met with an AI summary are not only less likely to click through to other websites but are also more likely to end their browsing session entirely. Researchers found that just 8% of users who were presented with Google's AI-generated overviews clicked on a traditional search result link, as opposed to those who did not encounter an AI summary, who clicked on a search result nearly twice as often. Just over a quarter of searches that produced an AI summary were closed without users clicking through to any links, compared with 16% of pages with only traditional search results. The summaries are also becoming more common. According to Pew, around one in five Google searches in March 2025 produced an AI summary, with 18% of all the Google searches in the study producing an AI summary. It's easy to see why the summaries are popular. Apart from a few minor user experience tweaks, search has remained largely untouched since its conception. Up until AI-powered search entered the scene, users had been presented with a list of links, ranked by an ever-changing Google algorithm, in response to what is normally a natural-language query. After the launch of AI-powered chatbots such as ChatGPT, the logical jump to technology's search potential was so obvious that Google declared a "code red" internally and began pouring resources into its AI development. Fast forward three years, and Google's AI Overviews are facing off against AI-powered search competitors like Perplexity and ChatGPT Search. More often than not, users who come to search engines are looking for an answer to a question. AI allows for a new, cleaner way to provide these answers, one that utilizes natural language and speeds up the search process for users. But the trade-off for this improved experience is the lack of click-through to other websites, potentially resulting in a catastrophic decline in website traffic, especially for sites that rely on informational content or rank highly for keywords. The study found that Google is far more likely to serve up an AI Overview in response to longer, more natural-sounding queries or questions. Just 8% of one or two-word searches produced an AI-generated summary. That figure jumps to 53% for searches containing ten words or more. Queries phrased as full sentences, especially those that include both a noun and a verb, triggered summaries 36% of the time. Meanwhile, question-based searches were the most likely to invoke an AI response, with 60% of queries beginning with "who," "what," "when," or "why" generating an Overview. While the overviews do link out and cite web sources, more often than not, the summaries lean heavily on a trio of Wikipedia, YouTube, and Reddit. Collectively, these three platforms accounted for 15% of all citations in AI Overviews, almost mirroring the three sites' 17% share of links in standard search results. Researchers found that AI Overviews were more likely to include links to Wikipedia and government websites, while standard search results featured YouTube links more prominently. Government sources represented 6% of AI-linked content, compared to just 2% in traditional results. In another potentially ominous sign for publishers hoping to capitalize on the AI revolution, news organizations remain largely flat in both formats, making up just 5% of links in AI Overviews and standard search results alike. Things are likely to get worse for web creators before they get better as Google leans further into AI in its search business. In May, Google unveiled a new "AI mode" search feature that intends to provide more direct answers to user questions. The answers provided by the new feature are similar to AI Overviews, and blend AI-generated responses with summarized and linked content from around the internet. Google has continually brushed off concerns that the overviews could negatively affect web traffic for creators. The company did not immediately respond to Fortune's request for comment on the Pew survey.

Google blasts study showing AI overviews slash web traffic

Gift 5 articles to anyone you choose each month when you subscribe. Almost no one clicks on a link in an AI-generated Google search result, a new study has found, confirming one of the news industry's biggest fears and directly contradicting what Google has been saying about its new AI overviews. In a month-long survey of 900 American adults and almost 69,000 Google searches, a US think tank called Pew Research Centre found users only clicked a link inside Google's AI summary result once in every 100 times it appeared.

Google AI Search Impact: Website Traffic Slashes by 50%

Google's AI Search Overview isn't Only Killing Click Rate, but it's also Creating Massive Transformation in Tradition Journalism Google's AI‑driven overviews are cutting website traffic for hundreds of reputable sites. Recent research has revealed that the number has dropped to almost half in just one year. Last year, Google introduced AI Overviews, a feature that shows an AI-generated result summary at the top of most search results. This has transformed online search by summarizing web content directly on the results page. While it has made things easier for users, websites are facing a significant negative impact from the Google AI Search feature, as readers have stopped clicking on publisher websites. Therefore, what started as a user-friendly innovation soon transformed into a threat to the traditional web economy.