Surprising no one, new research says AI Overviews cause massive drop in search clicks
And perhaps more troubling, Google users are more likely to end their browsing session after seeing an AI Overview. That suggests that many people are seeing information generated by a robot, and their investigation stops there. Unfortunately for these people, all forms of generative AI are prone to “hallucinations” that cause them to provide incorrect information. So more people could be walking away from a search with the wrong information.
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Google
AI Overviews are integrated with Google’s results, and they are appearing on more searches all the time.
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This problem is unlikely to improve over time. Since launching AI Overviews, Google has repeatedly expanded the number of searches that get robot summaries. The Pew Research Center says that about 1 in 5 searches now have AI Overviews. Generally, the more words in a search, the more likely it is to trigger an AI Overview, and that’s especially true for searches phrased as questions. The research shows that 60 percent of questions and 36 percent of full-sentence searches are answered by the AI.
Google naturally disagrees with this conclusions of this work. Here’s the company’s full statement: “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.”
Still, this research provides more evidence that Google’s use of AI is changing the way people gather information and interact with search results. The trends are bad for web publishing, but Google’s profits have never been higher. Funny how that works.
Updated 7/23 with Google statement.