Study: AI Overviews cut publisher click-through rates roughly in half

Pew Research Center published browsing-data evidence that Google’s AI Overviews reduced the rate at which users clicked through to external websites. Working with 900 US adults who shared their browsing history for March 2025 — 68,879 searches in total, of which 12,593 triggered an AI summary — Pew found users clicked a traditional search result in 8% of visits where a summary appeared, against 15% where it did not. Clicking a link cited inside the summary itself happened in just 1% of visits, and users were more likely to end their browsing session entirely after landing on a page with an AI summary (26%) than one without (16%).

Pew was explicit about the limits of the method: it covered only Google searches among panel members willing to install a tracker, the summaries shown were scraped some weeks after the browsing data was collected and could have changed in the interim, and the design could not establish that Overviews caused the lower click rate rather than correlating with search types users were already less likely to click through on.

The finding matched a wider pattern publishers reported through 2025. Data from Chartbeat covering more than 2,500 publisher websites found Google search referral traffic down 33% year-over-year by November 2025, and trade press described small publishers losing the bulk of their traffic to zero-click search and some shutting down as a result. Google disputed the methodology of some related traffic studies, arguing certain analyses coincided with unrelated algorithm testing, but did not dispute the general direction of the trend.