According to recent Pew Research Center research, Google’s AI-generated search summaries are reducing website traffic by almost half, which confirms publishers’ long-standing worries about the tech giant’s effects on the digital economy.
According to the study, which was published on Tuesday, consumers clicked on conventional search results only 8% of the time when Google’s results pages had AI Overviews, whereas they did so 15% of the time when there was none. The fact that only 1% of users clicked on the source links mentioned in the AI summaries itself is even more telling.
A Study Shows A Sharp Drop In Traffic
According to the Pew study, which examined the surfing patterns of 900 American adults in March 2025, 58% of them came across at least one Google search that resulted in an AI-generated summary. Additionally, consumers were more likely to terminate their browsing sessions completely when AI Overviews appeared, which happened in about one out of five searches (26% versus 16% on pages with simply standard search results).
According to Athena Chapekis, a data science expert at the Pew Research Center, “in 8 percent of all visits, users who saw an AI summary clicked on a traditional search result link.” “Those who did not encounter an AI summary clicked on a search result nearly twice as often.”
Compared to October 2024, when AI Overviews revealed no discernible effect on search referral traffic, the results mark a significant change.
Publishers Are Concerned About Revenue Risks
The study supports website owners’ long-standing claims that Google’s AI summaries are consuming their visitors and ad revenue. Similar findings have been made by a number of separate studies, some of which have shown drops in click-through rates of 15% to 35%.
In response, online newspapers have used titles like “Google Is Burying the Web Alive” and “AI is killing the web,” according to The Register. Is there anything that can save it?
For content producers that depend on search traffic, the financial ramifications are significant. According to BrightEdge data, click-through rates decreased 30% year over year, despite a 49% rise in Google search impressions.
The Industry Looks For Other Models
Now, the search-based advertising industry that has propelled a large portion of the online economy is being reexamined. Some businesses are looking at novel strategies. For example, Cloudflare is suggesting toll-taking infrastructure for AI crawlers in order to assist publishers in making money off of their content.
According to Google, AI Overviews give users “a jumping off point to explore links to learn more” and enable them to “get to the gist of a complicated topic or question more quickly.” Since the feature’s regular distribution started in May 2024, the business estimates that over 1 billion individuals have utilized it.