Pew Research Center tracked real web browsing behavior and confirmed what many publishers and SEOs have claimed: AI Overviews does not send traffic back to websites. The results show that the damage caused by AI summaries to the web ecosystem is as bad as or worse than is commonly understood.
Methodology
The Pew Research study tracked over 900 adults who consented to installing an online browsing tracker to record their browsing behavior in the month of March 2025. The dataset contains 68,879 unique Google search queries, and a total of 12,593 queries triggered an AI summary.
Confirmed: Google AI Search Is Eroding Referral Traffic
The tracked user data confirms publisher complaints about a drop in referral traffic caused by AI search results. Google users who encounter an AI search result are less likely to click on a link and visit a website than users who see only a standard search result.
Only 8% of users who encountered an AI summary clicked a link (in the AI summary or the standard search results) to visit a website. Users who only saw a standard search result tended to click to visit a website 15% of the time, nearly twice as many as users who viewed an AI summary.
Users rarely click a link within an AI summary. Only 1% of users clicked an AI summary link and visited a website.
AI Summaries Cause Less Web Engagement
In a recent interview, Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai pushed back on the notion that AI summaries have a negative impact on the web ecosystem. He said that the fact that there is more content being created on the web than at any other time is proof that the web ecosystem is thriving. He said that
“So, generally there are more web pages… I think people are producing a lot of content, and I see consumers consuming a lot of content. We see it in our products.”
Pichai also insisted that people are consuming content across multiple forms of content (video, images, text) and that publishers today should be presenting content within more than just one format.
However, contrary to what Google’s CEO said, AI is not encouraging users to consume more content, it’s having the opposite effect. The Pew research data shows that AI summaries cause users to engage less with web content.
According to the research findings:
Users End Their Browsing Session
“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.”
Users Refrain From Clicking On Traditional Search Links
It also says that users tended to not click on a traditional search result when faced with an AI summary:
“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).”
Only 1% Click Citation Links In AI Summaries
Users who see an AI summary overwhelmingly do not click the citations to the websites that the AI summary links to.
The report shows:
“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.”
This confirms what publishers and SEOs have been saying to Google over and over again: Google AI Overviews robs publishers of referral traffic. Rob is a strong word but given the context that Google is using web content to “synthesize” an answer to a search query that does not result in a referral click, the word “rob” is what inevitably comes to mind to a publisher or SEO who worked hard to create the content.
Another startling fact shared in research is that almost 66% of users either browsed somewhere else on Google or completely bailed on Google without clicking a link to visit a website. In other words, nearly 66% of Google’s users do not click a link to visit the web ecosystem.
The report explains:
“…the largest share of Google searches in our study resulted in the user either browsing elsewhere on Google or leaving the site entirely without clicking a link in the search results. Around two-thirds of all searches resulted in one of these actions.”
Wikipedia, YouTube And Reddit Dominate Google Searches
Google has been holding publisher events and Search Central Live events all around the world to listen to publisher feedback and to promise that Google will work harder to surface a greater variety of content. I know that the Googlers at these events are not lying, but those promises of surfacing more high-quality content are subverted by the grim facts presented in the Pew research of actual users.
One of the biggest complaints is that Reddit and Wikipedia dominate the search results. The research validates publisher and SEO concerns because it shows that not only are Reddit and Wikipedia the most commonly cited websites, but Google’s own YouTube ranks among the top three most cited web destinations.
The report explains:
“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.”
The report also shows:
- “Wikipedia links are somewhat more common in AI summaries than in standard search pages”
- “YouTube links are somewhat more common in standard search results than in AI summaries.”
These Are The Facts
Pew Research’s study of over 68,000 search queries from the browsing habits of over 900 adults reveals that Google’s AI summaries sharply reduce clicks to websites, with just 8% of users clicking any link and only 1% engaging with citations in AI answers.
Users encountering AI summaries are more likely to end their sessions or stay within Google’s ecosystem rather than visiting independent websites. This confirms publisher and SEO concerns that AI-driven search erodes web traffic and concentrates attention on a few dominant platforms like Wikipedia, Reddit, and YouTube.
These are the facts. They show that SEOs and publishers are right that AI Overviews is siphoning traffic out of the web ecosystem.
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Asier Romero
