Just Not Clicking: The Alarming Changes In Search Behavior With AI Summaries

Fresh off recent research that confirmed what publishers have long suspected — that the rise of Google’s AI Overviews has given rise to the percentage of searches resulting in zero clicks — and recently filed complaint brought by a UK-based coalition of publishers, Pew Research Center has released its own findings on search behavior for the 58% of survey respondents who saw at least one AI-generated summary at the top of their recent Google searches.

“Users who encountered an AI summary clicked on a traditional search result link in 8% of all visits,” writes Athena Chapekis and Anna Lieb. “Those who did not encounter an AI summary clicked on a search result nearly twice as often (15% of visits).”

(Source: Pew Research Center)

In addition to being less likely to click on resulting links, users who saw an AI summary also:

• “rarely clicked” on a link within the summary itself (1% of all visits, according to the research)
• were mostly frequently seeing Wikipedia, YouTube, or Reddit as the cited sources (15% of all sources)
• were more likely to end a browsing session than on pages without a summary (26%, compared to 16% of traditional search-result pages)

In response to Pew’s findings, a Google spokesperson told MediaPost’s Laurie Sullivan, “This study uses a flawed methodology and skewed query-set 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.”

Publishers — what traffic-patterns have you noticed since AI Overviews launched?