Another study finds AI overview is affecting search link clicks

More research on the impact of AI overview on the decline in publisher traffic has been published, and Google continues to deny it.

A Pew Research Center study found that at the top of the search page, the emergence of Google AI-generated summary significantly affected outbound clicks on other websites. The 900 American adults who participated in the study agreed to share their browsing activities. Here are some of the findings from Pew research:

• AI overview provided by Google users clicked on links to other sites 8% Time, users without AI overview are almost half the users (15%).

• After encountering an AI overview, users are more likely to end their browsing sessions. Users end their meeting 26% On the page 16% Pages without AI summary.

• The only one 1% In the summary, the user who encountered the AI overview clicked the referenced link.

The study, first published in May, was republished earlier this week, and conducted other analysis, responding to what publishers have said since their release last year. The emergence of AI-generated summaries collected from web data fundamentally forces users to click on the website in Google search results to find the information they need. Summary is sometimes wrong or hallucinated is a completely different worm can.

Organic search traffic from major news sites Wall Street Journal,,,,, The New York Timesand Washington Post According to similar network data, there has been a decline. Smaller standalone sites say the rollout of AI overview forces them to shut down sites or completely reinvent the distribution model due to traffic drops. Bloomberg Report. Other reports from SEO analysts found that AI overviews reduce clicks on the website compared to traditional search results.

Google leadership repeatedly refuted these claims, saying they did not see any changes in outbound clicks. “For any individual publisher, there are many reasons that can fluctuate,” Robby Stein VP of Robby Stein for Google Search said in a May interview with Mashable. “We don’t really look at specific publishers in this way. We really think about it overall.”

In an interview with The Verge, CEO Sundar Pichai talked about the claim of a decline in traffic, saying “We are sending traffic to a wider range of people. People may surface, surface more content, see more so someone can see it alone.”

In response to Pew’s findings, Google told Registration Records that they believed the study “used flawed methodology and skewed Querysets that do not represent search traffic” and then added “We have been directly loading billions of clicks to the website every day and have not observed a large summation drop as suggested network traffic.”