US EditionGoogle's AI Overviews Cut Link Clicks by Almost 50%, Putting Independent Sites at Risk
UNITED STATES, JUL 23 – Pew Research Center found AI Overviews appear in 18% of Google searches and reduce clicks on traditional links by nearly 50%, impacting publisher referral traffic and user engagement.
- A Pew Research Center study found that only 8% of users clicked traditional links when Google’s AI-generated overviews appeared in search results.
- This decline occurred as Google rolled out AI Overviews broadly in its Discover news feed and search app in the US, raising publisher concerns about lost traffic.
- The study of 900 US adults revealed that searches with AI summaries led to almost half as many link clicks compared to traditional results, and 26% ended the session after viewing summaries.
- Google maintains it has not observed significant traffic drops and argues AI features enable more questions and create new website connections, while publishers warn the summaries drive zero-click searches.
- The reduction in clicks to independent sites suggests a threat to the web’s advertising-driven model and may consolidate traffic to fewer large domains favored by AI sources like Wikipedia.
30 Articles
30 Articles
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 …
An investigation finds that only 1% is clicked on the links in Google's AI summaries, 15 times less than in normal searches.
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