ai-pocalypse Google Search users are less likely to click on search result links when those pages have AI Overviews, according to the Pew Research Center.
And the presence of those AI Overviews – summaries distilled from AI models trained on web content – on search results pages makes it more likely web users will end their browsing session.
The findings give further weight to prior reports that Google’s use of AI to recap the content on websites is depriving those websites of visitor traffic and corresponding ad revenue.
The non-profit Pew Research Center on Tuesday published a study based on data from 900 US adults who agreed to share their web browsing activity with researchers.
Of those, 58 percent conducted at least one search in March 2025 that surfaced an AI-generated query response that Google calls an AI Overview. Google began running AI Overviews regularly in May 2024.
When researchers looked at the survey participants’ data, they found that the presence of an AI Overview on a search results page made searchers nearly half as likely to click on search links, compared to pages without AI Overviews.
Those who did not encounter an AI summary clicked on a search result nearly twice as often
“Users who encountered an AI summary clicked on a traditional search result link in 8 percent of all visits,” explained Athena Chapekis, data science analyst for the Pew Research Center, in the online post. “Those who did not encounter an AI summary clicked on a search result nearly twice as often (15 percent of visits).”
Google includes links to source material summarized via AI Overviews, but searchers are even less likely to click on those links – just one percent did so.
As if to reduce that percentage further, Google recently added backlinks to its own search results within AI Overviews, alongside the link anchors pointing to source websites.
When AI Overviews do appear on search results pages – on 1 in 5 searches, roughly – Google users are more likely to end their browsing session, according to the Pew study. The session conclusion rate was 26 percent when an AI Overview was present, compared to 16 percent when the page contained only traditional search results.
This is a notable change from October 2024, when AI Overviews showed no significant impact on search referral traffic.
Concern about Google profiting from publisher content without sharing valuable web traffic has forced a reexamination of the search-based advertising business that has largely fueled the web economy. Web-based publications clearly have a self-interested opinion, with headlines like “Google Is Burying the Web Alive”, “AI is killing the web. Can anything save it?”, or our own take on the subject, “The AIpocalypse is here for websites as search referrals plunge.”
It’s not clear yet whether a viable alternative business model will emerge, but experimentation has begun. Earlier this month, Cloudflare proposed the creation of toll taking infrastructure for AI crawlers in an effort to help publishers.
For its part, Chocolate Factory claims that AI Overviews are helpful in guiding users to a wider variety of material online.
In documentation for developers, Google says, “AI Overviews help people get to the gist of a complicated topic or question more quickly, and provide a jumping off point to explore links to learn more. They were designed to show up on queries where they can add additional benefits beyond what people might already get on Search. With AI Overviews, people have been visiting a greater diversity of websites for help with more complex questions.”
Note that Google does not say “more people” are navigating away from Google to visit this more diverse set of websites. And the site diversity may be a reflection of common queries to popular websites being answered more frequently on Google.com. That’s what the Pew study suggests.
The search biz in March said that over 1 billion people have used AI Overviews. Google didn’t immediately respond to our request for comment on this story.
We note that Google Search will omit AI Overviews if you append “-ai” to the end of a search query or “&udm=14” as a URL parameter added to a search string. DuckDuckGo provides a dedicated URL for avoiding AI. Bing’s switch to disable AI in search results is said to be broken. ®
Updated to add at 2205 GMT on July 22, 2025
In a statement provided to The Register after this story was filed, Google disputed the Pew study’s methodology and data. “People are gravitating to AI-powered experiences, and AI features in Search enable people to ask even more questions, creating new opportunities for people to connect with websites. This study uses a flawed methodology and skewed queryset that is not representative of Search traffic. We consistently direct billions of clicks to websites daily and have not observed significant drops in aggregate web traffic as is being suggested.”