Google’s rollout of features such as AI Overviews and AI Mode in Search continues to fuel concerns about their negative impact on website traffic.
Users shown AI-generated summaries of search results, as part of Google AI Overviews, are less likely to click on the traditional URLs that appear below Overviews, according to a report by Pew Research Center.
Those who encountered an AI Overview only clicked on a website link eight per cent of the time. Meanwhile, those who were not shown an AI Overview were 15 per cent more likely to click on relevant website links, as per the study.
These findings are based on a study that involved analysing the web browsing activity of over 900 individuals in the United States. Links displayed within AI Overviews saw minimal click-through rates (1 per cent) as well.
% of Google searches in March 2025 that resulted in AI Overviews. (Image: Pew Research Center)
The Pew survey comes a year after Google introduced AI Overviews, a feature where AI-generated summaries appear above traditional hyperlinks to relevant webpages and are shown to users in more than 100 countries.
AI Overviews has raised concerns among online publishers and content creators who fear that these AI-generated summaries have caused web traffic to decline, as users are increasingly relying on these summaries to find information online instead of clicking through the links to the publishers’ websites.
Earlier this month, Google was hit with an antitrust complaint filed by a group of independent publishers in the European Union (EU) that accused the tech giant of causing “significant harm to publishers, including news publishers in the form of traffic, readership and revenue loss.”
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Most frequently cited sources
Over 18 per cent of all Google searches analysed by the study led to an AI-generated summary being shown to users. The majority (88 per cent) of these summaries or Overviews cited three or more sources.
% of links to websites in Google search results in March 2025. (Image: Pew Research Center)
These sources that were cited within AI Overviews included Wikipedia, YouTube and Reddit. “Wikipedia links are somewhat more common in AI summaries than in standard search pages, while YouTube links are somewhat more common in standard search results than in AI summaries,” the Pew report said.
“Collectively, they accounted for 15 per cent of the sources that were listed in the AI summaries we examined. They made up a similar share (17 per cent) of the sources listed in standard search results,” it added.
It further said that six per cent of the URLs found within AI Overviews linked out to government websites, while five per cent of URLs linked to news websites.
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