Follow-through failures: Google’s AI overviews cut website clicks by 50%, Pew study finds

A new Pew Research Center study confirms what many website owners suspected: Google’s AI Overviews are significantly reducing clicks to other websites, with searches featuring AI summaries generating nearly half the click-through rates of traditional search results. The findings challenge Google’s repeated claims that AI Overviews don’t harm web traffic, providing concrete evidence of how artificial intelligence is reshaping information consumption and potentially starving content creators of visitors.

The numbers: The Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan research organization, analyzed data from 900 users and found stark differences in click behavior between traditional and AI-enhanced search results.

• Searches without AI Overviews resulted in a 15% click rate to other websites.
• When AI Overviews appeared, click rates dropped to just 8% — nearly a 50% reduction.
• Only 1% of AI Overviews generated clicks on their cited sources, despite Google’s claims that users frequently click these links.
• Wikipedia, YouTube, and Reddit collectively account for 15% of all AI Overview sources.

Growing prevalence: Google has steadily expanded AI Overviews since their official launch in 2024, making them increasingly unavoidable for searchers.

• Approximately 1 in 5 searches now trigger AI Overviews, according to Pew’s analysis.
• Question-based searches are most likely to generate AI summaries, with 60% of questions receiving AI responses.
• Full-sentence searches trigger AI Overviews 36% of the time.
• Longer, more complex queries are increasingly likely to produce AI-generated answers.

Behavioral changes: The research reveals concerning patterns in how users interact with information when AI summaries are present.

• Users are more likely to end their browsing session immediately after viewing an AI Overview.
• This “search and stop” behavior means people may walk away with incomplete or incorrect information.
• The trend is particularly problematic given that all generative AI systems are prone to “hallucinations” — instances where the AI confidently provides factually incorrect responses.

Why this matters: The findings provide empirical evidence for what SEO experts and content creators have long argued — that Google’s AI features are fundamentally changing web traffic patterns in ways that could undermine the content ecosystem that feeds the search giant’s own AI systems. While website traffic suffers, Google’s profits continue reaching record highs, highlighting the asymmetric impact of AI integration on the broader web publishing industry.