Data Shows More Dependency on AI Summaries Rather Than Clicking Links
Last year, Google introduced “AI Overviews,” a feature that displays an artificial intelligence-generated result summary at the top of many Google search pages. This feature is available to millions of U.S. Google users. Online publishers recently have attributed declining web traffic to these summaries replacing traditional search results, claiming that many users are relying on the summaries instead of following links to the publishers’ websites.
A Pew Research Center report published this spring analyzed data from 900 U.S. adults who agreed to share their online browsing activity. About six-in-ten respondents (58%) conducted at least one Google search in March 2025 that produced an AI-generated summary. Additional analysis found that Google users were less likely to click on result links when visiting search pages with an AI summary compared with those without one. For searches that resulted in an AI-generated summary, users very rarely clicked on the sources cited.
Google users who encounter an AI summary are less likely to click on links to other websites than users who do not see one
Users who encountered an AI summary clicked on a traditional search result link in 8% of all visits. Those who did not encounter an AI summary clicked on a search result nearly twice as often (15% of visits). Google users who encountered an AI summary also rarely clicked on a link in the summary itself. This occurred in just 1% of all visits to pages with such a summary.
Google users are more likely to end their browsing session entirely after visiting a search page with an AI summary than on pages without a summary.
This happened on 26% of pages with an AI summary, compared with 16% of pages with only traditional search results. Regardless of whether a page had an AI-generated summary or not, the largest share of Google searches in our study resulted in the user either browsing elsewhere on Google or leaving the site entirely without clicking a link in the search results. Around two-thirds of all searches resulted in one of these actions.