Surprising no one, new research says AI Overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

Google's search results have undergone a seismic shift over the past year as AI fever has continued to escalate among the tech giants. Nowhere is this change more apparent than right at the top of Google's storied results page, which is now home to AI Overviews. Google contends these Gemini-based answers don't take traffic away from websites, but a new analysis from the Pew Research Center says otherwise. Its analysis shows that searches with AI summaries reduce clicks, and their prevalence is increasing.

Google began testing AI Overviews as the "search generative experience" in May 2023, and just a year later, they were an official part of the search engine results page (SERP). Many sites (including this one) have noticed changes to their traffic in the wake of this move, but Google has brushed off concerns about how this could affect the sites from which it collects all that data.

SEO experts have disagreed with Google's stance on how AI affects web traffic, and the newly released Pew study backs them up. The Pew Research Center analyzed data from 900 users of the Ipsos KnowledgePanel collected in March 2025. The analysis shows that among the test group, users were much less likely to click on search results when the page included an AI Overview.

Credit: Pre Research Center

Pew reports that searches without an AI answer resulted in a click rate of 15 percent. On SERPs with AI Overviews, the rate of clicks to other sites drops by almost half, to 8 percent. Google has also, on several occasions, claimed that people click on the links cited in AI Overviews, but Pew found that just 1 percent of AI Overviews produced a click on a source. These sources are most frequently Wikipedia, YouTube, and Reddit, which collectively account for 15 percent of all AI sources.