Pew Research Center released a report that showed Google searchers who encounter an AI Overview are less likely to click on links to other websites than users who do not see one. The study showed that 8% clicked on links to websites when an AI Overview was on the search results page, as opposed to 15% when an AI Overview was not on the page. For you math nerds, that is almost half!
The study also showed that it is super rare for anyone to click on a link to a website from within the AI Overview itself, only 1% of searchers did that.
Here is the chart Pew published on this:
Pew wrote:
Google users who encounter an AI summary are less likely to click on links to other websites than users who do not see one. Users who encountered an AI summary clicked on a traditional search result link in 8% of all visits. Those who did not encounter an AI summary clicked on a search result nearly twice as often (15% of visits).Google users who encountered an AI summary also rarely clicked on a link in the summary itself. This occurred in just 1% of all visits to pages with such a summary.
It also showed:
- Google users are more likely to end their browsing session entirely after visiting a search page with an AI summary than on pages without a summary. This happened on 26% of pages with an AI summary, compared with 16% of pages with only traditional search results.
- Overall, around one-in-five Google searches in March 2025 produced an AI summary. Some 18% of all the Google searches in our study generated an AI summary as part of the search results. The vast majority of these summaries (88%) cited three or more sources. Only 1% cited a single source.
- Google searches that contain more words, ask questions or use full sentences tend to produce AI summaries more often. Longer searches are more likely to produce an AI summary. Just 8% of one- or two-word searches resulted in an AI summary. But that share rose to 53% for searches with 10 words or more.
- The most frequently cited sources in both Google AI summaries and standard search results are Wikipedia, YouTube and Reddit. These three sites are the most commonly linked sources in AI summaries and standard search results alike. Collectively, they accounted for 15% of the sources that were listed in the AI summaries we examined. They made up a similar share (17%) of the sources listed in standard search results.
This all explains the great decoupling despite Google executives not believing these studies with all of the other click studies showing searchers are less likely to visit your website from Google Search when an AI Overview is on the page.
Google can share the data in Search Console but Google won't - no matter how many times I've asked...
The Pew Research Center report spring analyzed data from 900 U.S. adults who agreed to share their online browsing activity. About six-in-ten respondents (58%) conducted at least one Google search in March 2025 that produced an AI-generated summary.
Glenn does add a nice point on this data:
Another way to think about this is that 82% of results did not yield an AIO. And for those, 15% clicked a link versus 8% when finding an AIO :) -> A survey of 900 US Google users: of ~69K searches, 18% yielded AI Overviews; of those, users clicked a link 8% of the time, compared… pic.twitter.com/8lNIs7H0fo
— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) July 23, 2025
Forum discussion at X and WebmasterWorld.
Update: Google sent me the following statement on this study:
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.
