When an AI summary appears in Google search, people click on links less frequently, Research Show
A summary of AI generation that appears at the top of the search results for a particular type of query, Google’s AI Summary is unlikely to lead to site clicks from, according to reports from Pew Research on tuesday.
The study is based on data from 900 US adults who shared browsing data with Pew. Based on the results of the research, when AI Summary – AIO appeared in searches, users were less likely to click on a link when compared to queries that did not generate AI summary.
Pugh retrieved data from March and monitored URLS users visited on tracked devices. We used third-party web scraping services to perform the same search, collect all the text that was displayed on Google search pages, and collect links and AI-generated summaries. Of 68,879 unique searches, 12,593 generated AIO. This is about 18%. Pew saw which URL was visited after the user queried to analyze where the user would ultimately click. Google will either browse another site or end your browsing session completely.
Pew clicked the old link in Google Search (not AI Summary) and clicked 8% of the time when AIO was displayed in the search, but when AIO was not displayed, the click rate jumped to 15%. Interestingly, Pew found that only 1% of searches were users clicking on links found in AIO summary.
“The goal of our research was to better understand how people encounter and interact with AI-generated search overviews,” Athena Chapekis, analyst at Pew Research Computational Social Science, who worked on the research, told CNET in a statement. “This analysis is a snapshot of what real Google users do in their daily browsing.”
When AIO is displayed, nearly two-thirds of users will either jump to another site or close the Google search page completely, suggesting that the AI-generated results will meet the user’s search needs. Interestingly, Google’s AIO tends to cite Wikipedia, Reddit and YouTube the most frequently, accounting for a collective 15% of the sources found in AI summaries seen by Pew. Government sources also rank high in AIOs, accounting for 6% of sources linked to the AI overview surveyed by Pew. This may be because Wikipedia and government sources are nonprofit organizations and are considered reliable and without the same publisher’s request. Google also owns YouTube. This will drive traffic to one of the core online products. And Google inked it Reported millions of dollars of AI transactions I’ll use Reddit this year to use the data for AI training. Reddit also increased significantly in Google searches The past few years.
AI has also changed the search habits of people. Instead of searching through keywords, more people are searching across intentions and sentences. For longer search queries, more often, I triggered AIO.
“People are drawn to AI-powered experiences, and AI features allow you to ask more questions in searches and create new opportunities for people to connect with their website,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement. “This study uses flawed methodologies and distorted Querysets that do not represent search traffic. We direct billions of clicks to our websites every day and do not observe a significant drop in total web traffic as proposed.”
The publishing industry faces major headwinds Drop traffic across the internet. 2025 is already becoming a brutal year for journalism, and layoffs are CNN, VOX Media, Huffpost, The era and NBC. There are nearly 10,000 journalists. According to the company, he was fired in the past three years. To Nieman Reports. Online publishers also rely heavily on Google search for traffic, which manages almost 90% of the global online search market. GlobalStats. The judge declared that it was run by Google. Illegal monopoly on online search last yearand the federal court declared it earlier this year. Google’s online advertising business is also illegal monopoly.
AI-generated summary at the top of Google It’s been criticized It’s part of the recent traffic disruption for online publishers, but it was difficult to prove clearly as Google doesn’t provide clear data on what kind of traffic comes through the Search Console’s AIOS, and therefore doesn’t provide clear data on the backend to view Google’s search metrics. Past Google has argued that despite drops in search traffic, AI overviews bring it.High quality clicks“It means people with higher search intent who tend to stay on the site longer. However, Google does not provide data to support this.