Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results

Summary:

IThe work was published by Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan research group. The main goal was to measure real user behavior around Google AI Overviews instead of relying on guesses from publishers or tech companies.

Pew did this by using tracked web browsing data from 900 U.S. adults in its KnowledgePanel Digital panel. These people agreed to have their browsing on a tracked device recorded.

Pew examined all google.com searches those panelists made during March 2025, for a total of 68,879 unique Google searches. Then it re-ran those searches with a third-party scraping tool and captured what appeared on the first results page, including any AI summary text and up to three cited links. It then used the next URL and timestamp in each person’s browsing record to see what they did after the search page.

The biggest finding is simple: when an AI summary appeared, people were less likely to click out to the open web.

Users clicked a regular search result on 8% of visits with an AI summary, versus 15% on visits without one. They almost never clicked a link inside the AI summary itself: just 1% of those visits.

People were also more likely to stop browsing altogether after seeing a page with an AI summary, 26% versus 16% on pages without one. Around 18% of all Google searches in the study produced an AI summary. Most summaries cited three or more sources. The most common sources in both AI summaries and regular results were Wikipedia, YouTube and Reddit. Government sites showed up more often in AI summaries than in standard results, while news sites made up 5% of links in both. AI summaries were also more likely to appear for longer searches, searches written as questions, and searches written in full-sentence form.

Some notes:

This is observed behavior, which is a strength, but it only covers 900 adults on tracked devices in one panel, so it is not the same as seeing all Google users.

The search results Pew collected came days after the original searches, and AI summaries can change over time, so the captured results may not perfectly match what every user saw in the moment.