Pew Analysis Middle launched a report that confirmed Google searchers who encounter an AI Overview are much less more likely to click on on hyperlinks to different web sites than customers who don’t see one. The research confirmed that 8% clicked on hyperlinks to web sites when an AI Overview was on the search outcomes web page, versus 15% when an AI Overview was not on the web page. For you math nerds, that’s virtually half!
The research additionally confirmed that it’s tremendous uncommon for anybody to click on on a hyperlink to a web site from throughout the AI Overview itself, only one% of searchers did that.
Right here is the chart Pew revealed on this:
Pew wrote:
Google customers who encounter an AI abstract are much less more likely to click on on hyperlinks to different web sites than customers who don’t see one. Customers who encountered an AI abstract clicked on a standard search consequence hyperlink in 8% of all visits. Those that didn’t encounter an AI abstract clicked on a search consequence almost twice as usually (15% of visits).
Google customers who encountered an AI abstract additionally hardly ever clicked on a hyperlink within the abstract itself. This occurred in simply 1% of all visits to pages with such a abstract.
It additionally confirmed:
- Google customers usually tend to finish their searching session completely after visiting a search web page with an AI abstract than on pages with no abstract. This occurred on 26% of pages with an AI abstract, in contrast with 16% of pages with solely conventional search outcomes.
- General, round one-in-five Google searches in March 2025 produced an AI abstract. Some 18% of all of the Google searches in our research generated an AI abstract as a part of the search outcomes. The overwhelming majority of those summaries (88%) cited three or extra sources. Only one% cited a single supply.
- Google searches that comprise extra phrases, ask questions or use full sentences have a tendency to supply AI summaries extra usually. Longer searches usually tend to produce an AI abstract. Simply 8% of one- or two-word searches resulted in an AI abstract. However that share rose to 53% for searches with 10 phrases or extra.
- Essentially the most steadily cited sources in each Google AI summaries and customary search outcomes are Wikipedia, YouTube and Reddit. These three websites are essentially the most generally linked sources in AI summaries and customary search outcomes alike. Collectively, they accounted for 15% of the sources that had been listed within the AI summaries we examined. They made up the same share (17%) of the sources listed in customary search outcomes.
This all explains the nice decoupling regardless of Google executives not believing these research with the entire different click on research displaying searchers are much less more likely to go to your web site from Google Search when an AI Overview is on the web page.
Google can share the information in Search Console however Google will not – regardless of what number of instances I’ve requested…
The Pew Analysis Middle report spring analyzed information from 900 U.S. adults who agreed to share their on-line searching exercise. About six-in-ten respondents (58%) performed at the least one Google search in March 2025 that produced an AI-generated abstract.
Glenn does add a pleasant level on this information:
One other means to consider that is that 82% of outcomes didn’t yield an AIO. And for these, 15% clicked a hyperlink versus 8% when discovering an AIO 🙂 -> A survey of 900 US Google customers: of ~69K searches, 18% yielded AI Overviews; of these, customers clicked a hyperlink 8% of the time, in contrast… pic.twitter.com/8lNIs7H0fo
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) July 23, 2025
Discussion board dialogue at X and WebmasterWorld.
Replace: Google despatched me the next assertion on this research:
Individuals are gravitating to AI-powered experiences, and AI options in Search allow folks to ask much more questions, creating new alternatives for folks to attach with web sites. This research makes use of a flawed methodology and skewed queryset that isn’t consultant of Search site visitors. We persistently direct billions of clicks to web sites every day and haven’t noticed important drops in mixture net site visitors as is being recommended.
