Study reveals that 'AI-generated summaries' in search results make users less likely to click on links
A study by the nonprofit Pew Research Center found that Google search users are less likely to click on links on search results that show an 'AI-generated summary' than those that don't.
Do people click on links in Google AI summaries? | Pew Research Center
Google AI Overviews are killing the web: Pew study • The Register
https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/22/google_ai_overviews_suppress_search/
'AI Summary' is a system introduced by Google in May 2024 that displays information compiled by AI at the top of search results, and will support Japanese from August 2024.
Google's AI-driven summary feature that clearly outlines search results now supports Japanese - GIGAZINE
It has been noted that since the introduction of this 'AI summary,' traffic to websites has plummeted.
The Pew Research Center analyzed data collected from 900 American adults who conducted at least one Google search in March 2025, totaling 68,879 searches. Of those, 58% displayed an 'AI summary.'
And when the AI summary was shown in the search results, people were less likely to click on links to other websites than when the AI summary was not shown.
Specifically, users who were not shown an 'AI summary' were more likely to click on the page's link when the search results were displayed 15% of the time, while users who were shown an 'AI summary' were more likely to click on the link 8% of the time, almost half of which. Note that the 'AI summary' may contain referral links to other pages, but these were only clicked 1% of the time.
In addition, when there was no 'AI summary,' the percentage of people who closed their browser after finishing their search was 16%, but with 'AI summary' this increased to 26%, suggesting that there is a certain number of people who are satisfied with the 'AI summary' and finish their browsing.
Among those who continued searching, 35% did so without an AI summary and 32% did so with an AI summary. Additionally, among those who left Google for another site, 33% did so without an AI summary and 34% did so with an AI summary.
Based on this, the Pew Research Center concluded that 'regardless of whether or not an AI summary was available, nearly two-thirds of people either continued searching on Google or left Google without clicking on a result.'
The sites most frequently cited in AI summaries were Wikipedia, Reddit, and YouTube, accounting for 15% of the AI summaries surveyed. These three sites also accounted for 17% of sources in regular Google search results. However, there was a tendency for the AI summaries to have more links to Wikipedia, while regular searches tended to have more links to YouTube. Only 1% of AI summaries had a single source, while 88% used three or more sources.
By the way, the 'AI summary' tends to appear more easily when the number of words used in the search increases. When one or two words were used, the appearance rate was 8%, but when the number of words was increased to 10 or more, the appearance rate increased to 53%.
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