An article from Pew Research Center summarising results from one of their reports: they captured (with permission) search histories from 900 people, to see what the pattern was when there was an AI-generated summary from a search. Basically, "For searches that resulted in an AI-generated summary, users very rarely clicked on the sources cited". Also "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 is the article:
Chapekis, A. & Lieb, A. (2025, July 22). Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/07/22/google-users-are-less-likely-to-click-on-links-when-an-ai-summary-appears-in-the-results/
This is the original (May 2025) report: What Web Browsing Data Tells Us About How AI Appears Online https://www.pewresearch.org/data-labs/2025/05/23/what-web-browsing-data-tells-us-about-how-ai-appears-online/ (the full methodology is on the third page)
This is the article that gave me the link to the Pew report: it has useful discussion of how this lack of click-through is affecting news/information sites (there are a lot of ads on the page btw):
Uren, C. (2025, August 3). Google AI summary feature deals blow to link clicks and website traffic. Euro News. https://www.euronews.com/next/2025/08/03/google-ai-summary-feature-deals-blow-link-clicks-and-website-traffic
Photo by Sheila Webber: front door, July 2025
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