The traffic and readers that websites have painstakingly cultivated are facing a huge impact due to Google's AI Overviews. A study released by the Pew Research Center indicates that the probability of users clicking on websites with AI Overviews has nearly halved, to only 8%.
In May of this year, AI summaries officially added support for Chinese, allowing Taiwanese users to enjoy the convenience of this feature. However, this may not be good news for website operators. A report released this year by the Pew Research Center, through analysis of browsing data shared by 900 respondents and nearly 70,000 Google search records, found that users are less likely to click on search results with AI summaries, and even when the AI summaries include the source, almost no one clicks on them.
AI summaries present the search results directly to users, eliminating the need for them to manually verify various sources and determine the accuracy and relevance of article content. AI summaries allow users to complete their search journey simply by entering keywords and pressing Enter.
Impact 1: Pages with AI summaries saw their click-through rates halved.
The Pew Research Center study found that when Google search results included AI summaries, only 8% of users clicked on the website links, compared to 15% for searches without AI summaries—almost double the former. Even when AI summaries included source links, only 1% of users clicked on them.
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Impact 2: With AI summaries, users are more likely to end their browsing.
Furthermore, when search results include AI summaries, a higher percentage of users completely end the browsing process, while a slightly lower percentage continue using Google search. Specifically, 26% of users end browsing search results with AI summaries, significantly higher than the 16% without AI summaries.
Impact 3: AI summarization often cites Wikipedia and government agency websites.
Pew also noted that links to Wikipedia and government agencies saw a significant increase in visibility on AI-generated summary search pages compared to traditional searches, rising from 3% and 2% respectively to as much as 6%. Even Google's own video platform, YouTube, experienced a significant drop in visibility on AI-generated summary searches, declining from 8% to 4% of traditional searches.
Impact 4: Long sentence searches are easier
Overall, Pew Research found that about one-fifth—approximately 18%—of all Google search results contain AI summaries, and that AI summaries are more likely to appear in search results when the search uses more words, asks questions, or even complete sentences.
In search results with only one or two keywords, AI summaries appear in only 8% of the results. However, when the number of words in the search reaches 10 or more, the rate of AI summaries appears as high as 53%. Furthermore, when questions are asked in the form of "why," "when," or "who," AI summaries appear in 60% of the results. Searching with complete sentences also has a 36% chance of producing AI summaries.
However, Google naturally objected to Pew's research claiming that AI summarization significantly reduced user clicks on search results.
"People are increasingly drawn to AI-driven experiences, and AI capabilities in search allow people to ask more questions, creating more opportunities for people to connect with websites." Google refuted Pew's findings, stating, "This study is methodologically flawed, uses biased search data, and does not represent search traffic. We drive billions of clicks to our websites every day and have not observed a significant drop in web traffic."
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Online media outlets are lamenting the situation, pessimistically predicting that "Google traffic may drop to zero."
Despite Google's denial of declining traffic, several studies have observed similar results. A study by SEO marketing firm Ahrefs in April of this year analyzed 300,000 keywords and found that pages with AI summaries in search results had an average click-through rate 34.5% lower than pages without AI summaries.
Many media outlets have seen a significant drop in Google search traffic, which they have relied on for years. In May of this year, Business Insider announced that it would lay off 21% of its staff to cope with the "uncontrollable sharp decline in traffic"; Nicholas Thompson, CEO of the long-established magazine The Atlantic, went even further, saying that they should assume that Google traffic will "drop to zero" and adjust their business model accordingly.
Thompson believes that Google is transforming from a search engine to an answer engine, and "we must develop a new strategy."
However, since the birth of the internet, media traffic has been subject to various forms of diversion and competition. The rise of social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram has taken away a wave of traffic that originally belonged to various online media, forcing each media outlet to manage its own fan pages, accounts, and even produce videos to cater to the viewing preferences of contemporary internet users.
The emergence of AI summarization may once again force the internet to undergo a transformation. However, in this nascent stage of AI applications, the direction of this transformation remains to be explored by many pioneers.
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