Stunning nobody, new analysis says AI Overviews trigger huge drop in search clicks

Google’s search outcomes have undergone a seismic shift over the previous 12 months as AI fever has continued to escalate among the many tech giants. Nowhere is this modification extra obvious than proper on the high of Google’s storied outcomes web page, which is now house to AI Overviews. Google contends these Gemini-based solutions do not take site visitors away from web sites, however a brand new evaluation from the Pew Analysis Middle says in any other case. Its evaluation exhibits that searches with AI summaries cut back clicks, and their prevalence is rising.

Google started testing AI Overviews because the “search generative expertise” in Might 2023, and only a 12 months later, they have been an official a part of the search engine outcomes web page (SERP). Many websites (together with this one) have seen adjustments to their site visitors within the wake of this transfer, however Google has disregarded issues about how this might have an effect on the websites from which it collects all that information.

search engine optimization specialists have disagreed with Google’s stance on how AI impacts internet site visitors, and the newly launched Pew research backs them up. The Pew Analysis Middle analyzed information from 900 customers of the Ipsos KnowledgePanel collected in March 2025. The evaluation exhibits that among the many take a look at group, customers have been a lot much less prone to click on on search outcomes when the web page included an AI Overview.

Pew experiences that searches with out an AI reply resulted in a click on charge of 15 %. On SERPs with AI Overviews, the speed of clicks to different websites drops by virtually half, to eight %. Google has additionally, on a number of events, claimed that individuals click on on the hyperlinks cited in AI Overviews, however Pew discovered that simply 1 % of AI Overviews produced a click on on a supply. These sources are most ceaselessly Wikipedia, YouTube, and Reddit, which collectively account for 15 % of all AI sources.