Pew recorded nearly 69,000 unique searches from those users. Around 18 percent of those triggered an AI-generated response. For the searches that included one of these summaries, users clicked on a standard result just 8 percent of the time. On pages without the summaries, that number rose to 15 percent. Clicks within the AI Overviews themselves were even lower. Only about 1 percent of users selected links embedded directly in the summaries.
The data also showed that when people saw an AI-generated response, they were more likely to stop browsing. About 26 percent of sessions ended after seeing a page with an AI Overview. When the summaries were not present, the session-ending rate dropped to 16 percent.
Many of the summaries pointed users toward familiar platforms. Wikipedia, YouTube, and Reddit made up a significant portion of sources used within the Overviews. Together, they accounted for 15 percent of the links cited in those summaries. Government websites also showed up frequently, covering about 6 percent of the content referenced. YouTube belongs to Google, and Reddit signed a deal earlier this year that allows Google to use its content for training AI models. That agreement likely contributed to Reddit’s presence in the results.
Search habits have shifted in recent years. Users now tend to enter full sentences or more detailed queries, which more often bring up the AI summaries. That behavior, combined with the presence of AI Overviews, suggests that many users feel satisfied without clicking any further. The result is less traffic leaving Google’s search page and fewer visits to external websites.
This change is hitting online publishers at a time when many are already struggling. Over the past three years, close to 10,000 journalists have been laid off across major outlets including CNN, HuffPost, Vox Media, and NBC. Google remains the primary driver of online traffic, controlling almost 90 percent of the global search market. The company’s influence over how information is surfaced has become a major concern, especially as more web traffic remains inside its ecosystem.
The Pew study did not attempt to draw conclusions about long-term industry effects. It focused only on a short period. Still, the findings confirm what many publishers have suspected for some time. Traffic from Google is becoming harder to secure. In the past, Google argued that the Overviews help users reach more diverse sites and stay engaged with meaningful content. But it has not released public data to support those claims. The company also said it continues to send billions of clicks to websites every day and disagreed with Pew’s research methods. That response did not include numbers showing how many clicks come directly from the AI summaries.
Earlier this month, Cloudflare suggested a new approach. It proposed setting up a system that would charge AI crawlers for access to web content. The goal would be to create a model where content providers are compensated when their pages are used to train or generate AI responses.
Google’s role in the digital ad and search industries has come under growing legal pressure. A judge ruled last year that its dominance in search amounted to an illegal monopoly. A second ruling this year reached the same conclusion for its advertising business. As AI continues to shape how people search, the gap between content creators and content platforms may widen. For now, search data points to fewer clicks for publishers when AI takes the lead on the page.
Read next: Longer Thinking, Lower Accuracy: Research Flags Limits of Extended AI Reasoning
by Web Desk via Digital Information World
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