Google’s latest search feature is quietly reshaping how millions of Americans find information online, and the results might surprise you. The tech giant’s “AI Overviews” those neatly packaged summaries that now appear at the top of many search results are keeping users on Google’s pages longer while sending fewer people to the websites that actually created the content.
A new Pew Research Center study reveals just how dramatically these AI-generated summaries are affecting user behavior.
After analyzing the browsing habits of 900 U.S. adults in March 2025, researchers found that people are clicking through to other websites far less often when they encounter these AI summaries.
Study Reveals Sharp Decline in Search Clicks Due to AI Summaries
The numbers tell a clear story: when users see an Artificial Intelligence summary on their search page, they click on traditional search result links only 8% of the time.
Compare that to searches without AI summaries, where users click through nearly twice as often 15% of the time. Even more striking, users almost never click on the sources cited within the AI summaries themselves, doing so in just 1% of visits.
Perhaps most concerning for website owners and publishers, people are simply ending their browsing sessions after reading these AI summaries. About 26% of users who encounter an AI summary call it quits right there, compared to only 16% who do the same on pages with traditional search results.
“Online publishers recently have attributed declining web traffic to these summaries replacing traditional search results,” the study notes, highlighting growing tension between Google and content creators who depend on search traffic for their livelihood.
The feature has rolled out to millions of U.S. Google users, with about 58% of study participants conducting at least one search that produced an AI summary during the month-long study period. Overall, roughly one in five Google searches now generates these automated summaries.
How Search Query Length and Style Influence Google’s AI Overviews
Google’s algorithm seems to favor certain types of searches when deciding whether to display an Artificial Intelligence overview. The length and style of your search query makes a big difference longer, more conversational searches are far more likely to trigger a summary.
Single-word or two-word searches rarely produce AI summaries, generating them only 8% of the time. But stretch your query to 10 words or more, and you’ll see a summary 53% of the time. Questions work particularly well: searches beginning with “who,” “what,” “when,” or “why” result in AI summaries 60% of the time.
Full sentences also seem to catch the algorithm’s attention, with 36% of searches containing both a noun and verb producing summaries.
When Google’s AI does create these summaries, it’s drawing from familiar sources. Wikipedia, YouTube, and Reddit dominate both AI summaries and traditional search results, collectively accounting for about 15% of all cited sources in summaries and 17% in standard results.
There are some interesting differences, though. Government websites (.gov domains) appear more frequently in AI summaries than in regular search results 6% versus 2%. Wikipedia links are also slightly more common in AI summaries, while YouTube links show up more often in traditional results.
Are AI Summaries Killing Website Traffic?
Most AI summaries aren’t one-source affairs either. The vast majority 88% cite three or more sources, a mere 1% cite a single source. The median abstract is around 67 words, though they vary between a minimum of seven words and a maximum of 369 words.
Despite all this, the reality is that most Google searches don’t result in individuals clicking through to other websites in the first place.
Almost two-thirds of all the searches in the test concluded with the users being stuck on Google or abandoning the site entirely without ever clicking on a link regardless of whether or not there was an AI summary.
However, for content creators and publishers who’ve built their businesses on search traffic, even slight percentage changes can result in millions of dollars in lost revenue. As abstracts of AI become more prevalent and advanced, the balance between content creators and search engines will likely continue to shift.
The real question is whether this is a short-term transitional phase or a long-term change in the way individuals access information on the internet.
