Truly, AI in Search is driving extra queries and better high quality clicks

Final month, a Pew Analysis Heart report make clear Google’s AI Overviews’ impact on net publishing. Briefly, the evaluation painted an abysmal outlook for anybody counting on net visitors. However on Wednesday, Google Search head Liz Reid penned a blog post that places fairly a distinct spin on issues. The Google VP claims visitors from search to web sites is “comparatively secure” and that click on high quality has elevated.

Reid’s framing boils all the way down to every little thing is peachy, and AI is making issues higher — even for web sites! She wrote that Google Search’s complete natural click on quantity to web sites has been “comparatively” secure year-over-year. Reid additionally claimed Google sends extra “high quality clicks” (guests who do not rapidly bounce) to web sites than a yr in the past. The corporate says individuals are additionally happier with the search expertise.

The corporate did not share any numbers — the publish has no information in any way — to assist its claims.

Google’s rationalization for the rosy outlook? “With AI Overviews, individuals are looking extra and asking new questions which can be usually longer and extra advanced,” Reid wrote. “As well as, with AI Overviews, individuals are seeing extra hyperlinks on the web page than earlier than. Extra queries and extra hyperlinks imply extra alternatives for web sites to floor and get clicked.”

Reid does spotlight a shifting panorama. She says consumer traits are leading to decrease visitors for some websites and elevated visitors for others. After all, the Google Search head did not name out any particular web sites. However she claims boards, movies, podcasts and posts with “genuine voices and first-hand views” are thriving. Reid added that content material like “an in-depth assessment, an authentic publish, a novel perspective, or a considerate first-person evaluation” does properly.

The Google VP mentioned folks looking for easy Q&A varieties of searches are leaning extra on AI. “For some questions the place individuals are in search of a fast reply, like ‘when is the subsequent full moon,’ folks could also be happy with the preliminary AI Overviews response and never click on additional,” Reid wrote. “This has additionally been true for different reply options we have added, just like the Data Graph or sports activities scores. However for a lot of different varieties of questions, folks proceed to click on by means of, as they need to dig deeper into a subject, discover additional or make a purchase order. This is the reason we see click on high quality growing — an AI response would possibly present the lay of the land, however folks click on to dive deeper and be taught extra, and once they do, these clicks are extra beneficial.”

It is fairly the distinction from the Pew report. It discovered that guests who noticed an AI abstract clicked a conventional search lead to eight % of all visits. These with out an AI abstract? They clicked on a conventional lead to 15 % of their visits. As for really clicking the supply hyperlinks in AI summaries? Pew’s research discovered that one % of Google searches that included AI summaries resulted in a consumer clicking on these supply hyperlinks. Customers had been additionally extra more likely to finish their shopping after visiting a web page with an AI abstract.

That aligned with feedback Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince made in June. He mentioned search visitors referrals preserve plummeting. “The way forward for the online goes to be increasingly more like AI, and that implies that individuals are going to be studying the summaries of your content material, not the unique content material,” he mentioned. Prince mentioned {that a} decade in the past, Google despatched a writer one customer for each two pages it crawled. Early this yr, it dropped to 1 customer for each six pages. He mentioned that, in June, it was down to 1 for each 18.

I can not inform you who to imagine. However this is what the final word supply needed to say:

Correction, August 7, 2025, 2:55PM ET: This text has been up to date to notice that Pew’s research discovered one % of Google searches with AI summaries had somebody click on on a supply hyperlink in these summaries. It beforehand acknowledged that one % of search customers clicked on these supply hyperlinks.