AI Summaries on Google Reduce User Clicks to External Sites, Raising Concerns for Publishers

According to the latest research from the Pew Research Center, Google's AI Overviews (AIOs) are changing how people use the search engine, and this may not be good news for website owners and publishers.

In March 2025, the study looked at almost 69,000 Google searches made by 900 adults in the U.S. It found that people were much less likely to click on regular website links when an AI-generated summary was at the top of a search. Only 8% of users clicked on regular search results when an AI Overview was shown. The click rate was almost double without the AI summary, at about 15%.

Even more surprising, only 1% of users clicked on the links inside the AI Overviews themselves. A lot of the time, people didn't click on anything at all. When AIOs came out, 26% of users left their session without clicking on any links, while only 16% of users left their session without clicking on any links. This means that AI summaries are giving people enough information that they don't need to go to other sites.

The sources mentioned in these summaries also tend to favor big sites like Wikipedia,Reddit, and YouTube.  It's worrying for traditional media that government websites and news outlets don't show up as often.

This change is alarming for publishers. A lot of people depend on Google traffic to stay in business, but visits to their websites and ad revenue are going down because fewer people are clicking through. More than 8,000 journalists in the U.S. have lost their jobs since 2022, and AI is playing a bigger and bigger role in these cuts.

The future of online content and the people who make it is still up in the air as Google moves forward with AI tools.

Information referenced in this article is from Business Today