Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results
Last year, Google introduced “AI Overviews,” a feature that displays an artificial intelligence-generated result summary at the top of many Google search pages. This feature is available to millions of U.S. Google users. Online publishers recently have attributed declining web traffic to these summaries replacing traditional search results, claiming that many users are relying on the summaries instead of following links to the publishers’ websites.
A Pew Research Center report published this 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. Additional analysis found that Google users were less likely to click on result links when visiting search pages with an AI summary compared with those without one. For searches that resulted in an AI-generated summary, users very rarely clicked on the sources cited.
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State of the business model | Copyright and intellectual property
Related Knowledge Center: State of the business model
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