The introduction of Google's AI Overviews is significantly altering user interactions with search results. Research from the Pew Research Center reveals only 8% of users clicked on traditional links after encountering an AI summary, significantly lower than the click rate for those without an AI overview. Additionally, over 25% of searches producing AI summaries ended without any link clicks, compared to 16% for traditional search results. By March 2025, AI summaries were present in 20% of Google searches, indicating a shift in the search landscape favoring AI-driven content.
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.
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.
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.
Collection
[
|
...
]