More Research Concludes AI Overview is Killing Clicks

Google has long argued that AI Overview is not killing traffic to publishers. Additional research is showing otherwise.

Google’s AI Overview is decimating traffic for publishers who use Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as part of their strategy for growth. This isn’t exactly earth shattering news at this point, though Google has long denied that this is a trend. Anecdotally, however, we’ve seen the negative impacts first hand with traffic being on quite the decline since AI Overview first became a thing. That, of course, being having traffic of around 200 – 400 views per day all the way down to a meagre 50 – 75 views. In fact, in recent months, traffic is further bleeding to the point where days of getting around 40 views in a day are becoming more and more common. For us, it is stupidly obvious what the impact of AI Overview has been along with the potential for further harm due to AI Mode which is Google’s AI only search results function.

Of course, Freezenet, while being among the first to raise the alarm about this, is far from the only ones noticing this trend. Cloudflare launched their own study and found that AI Overview is killing the click and ended up coming up with a term to describe the phenomenon: the “zero click” internet. The research effectively confirmed what everyone already knew: traffic is drying up and Google is hoarding more and more traffic for themselves.

Understandably, this has caused alarm for others who realized that they were going to get wiped out of existence from a business perspective. Publishers were diligently publishing their material, AI was summarizing the content, and publishers were getting nothing in return for feeding the AI machine. Fortunately, a complaint was lodged against Google in Europe citing anti-trust as a reason for the complaint. A big point about this is, of course, “unjust enrichment” where Google is enriching themselves by summarizing the publishers content and negatively impacting the publishers afterwards by holding back clicks as they encourage users to stay on Google instead.

The negative impacts were obvious and one big player admitted that the open web is in rapid decline as a result of the changes taking place. This was an admission made by non other than Google themselves who made that admission in court documents. Google attempted to walk back those comments afterwards with some convoluted reasoning that doesn’t really make any sense, but the damage was already done.

Perhaps the most surprising thing in all of this is that there wasn’t much in the way of challenge from publishers who stand to see their online audience gradually vanish over time and see their operations become completely unprofitable. That, however, changed when magazines including Rolling Stone Magazine sued Google in the US for anti-trust. It represented, at minimum, the first lawsuit challenging Google’s efforts to sap publishers of their traffic for themselves.

Of course, the negative impacts of AI Overview is still sparking interest for researchers and another analysis has basically added to the growing body of evidence of how devastating the impacts of AI Overview actually is for publishers. The general conclusion is that AI Overview is killing clicks. From Search Engine Land:

Visibility in Google’s AI Overviews doesn’t equal traffic.

In my research from the first half of this year, AI Overview citations consistently underperformed – even compared to traditional blue links near the bottom of the SERP.

An AI Overview citation can still help with authority, brand recall, positioning, and maybe even long-term LLM training.

But for short-term clicks? The data paints a sobering picture.

So, in other words, while not being found on AI Overview basically wipes out all traffic from Google to your site, even if you are visible in the AI summaries, you aren’t necessarily going to be getting the clicks. In fact, you are getting far fewer clicks than if your site is found in a top ranking position of a normal search engine result:

• Ranking first in an AI Overview delivers roughly Position 6 clicks: Far from the golden ticket many assume.
• AI Overview CTR curves fall off a cliff – fast: By Position 5, most citations might as well be on the 10th page of Google’s search results.
• The Top 3 blue links still perform best: The strongest AI Overview slot doesn’t match the Top 3 organic SERP results. Blue links still dominate where it matters: driving real, high-intent traffic.

In other words, if your result comes up in a normal search query, you would rather be found in position 5 than be in the first position of an AI Overview result. This is because you would get more traffic from such a position assuming this was an option. Things get worse and worse as you go down the result chain in the AI response.

So, why are users less likely to click a citation in AI than they are in organic search results?

In a blue link, the brand is both a doorway and a marquee.

After all, a traditional blue link has an optimized title and an attention-grabbing meta description to attract that all-valuable click.

But in AI Overviews, brands are given a small, bland citation, with only a fraction of the meta description available. It’s basically a mousehole.

In other words, there is far less of a need to click and even if you do appear to users, your branding and your presence is largely non-existent in the first place.

The results are not really all that surprising by any means. We’ve long known that Google was absolutely butchering independent websites for their traffic. Livelihoods are getting decimated. While some lucky winners are getting some small scraps of traffic, most are just disappearing completely. As a result, the negative impacts are obvious. You get a more homogeneous view on things at best and, more likely, getting hallucinated results thanks to someone making a sarcastic comment on Reddit at some point.

This is why I’m hoping the legal challenges are ultimately successful. After all, the future of written journalism and information sharing is getting pretty limited as time moves forward. Google, for their part, isn’t exactly slowing down in the march towards the demise of independent information gatherers. It has resulted in people like us going from looking for opportunities to grow a business to simply being in survival mode and seeing how long we can last.

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook.