(22 Jul 2025) 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.
Some findings including-
- Google users who encounter an AI summary are less likely to click on links to other websites than users who do
- not see one.
- 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.
- The most frequently cited sources in both Google AI summaries and standard search results are Wikipedia, YouTube and Reddit.
- Overall, around one-in-five Google searches in March 2025 produced an AI summary.
- Google searches that contain more words, ask questions or use full sentences tend to produce AI summaries more often.
Find out more here.
