Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results
Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results
Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results
Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results
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From the article
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
No shit. It’s one of the reasons I don’t understand why Google is so excited about AI. It will further degrade their ad model.
How could this anything else? I previously had only one option for how to get my answers and now I have two, the only way for link clicks to stay the same is if no one thought the results returned ever gave them any kind of answer. If google had human created summary pages for common queries, the result would be the same.