Pew: AI summaries cut Google click-throughs to 8% from 15%

A new Pew Research analysis puts a number on something publishers have been worrying about all year. When Google's AI summary appears at the top of a results page, users click on a traditional search result in 8% of visits. When no summary appears, they click in 15% of visits. The click rate is roughly halved, and the pattern holds across 68,879 unique Google searches drawn from 900 U.S. adults in the KnowledgePanel Digital panel.

The link inside the summary itself fares even worse. Pew reports that users clicked on a source link in the AI summary in just 1% of visits, which means the citation footer Google added partly to answer publisher complaints is, in practice, almost never used. For the overwhelming majority of users who see one, the summary is the answer.

The session-ending pattern is the other half of the story. After a results page with an AI summary, users ended their browsing session 26% of the time. After a traditional results page, the figure was 16%. People appear to be reading the summary, accepting it as good enough, and leaving the open web entirely.

The honest caveats are real. Pew analyzed search results collected April 7-17, 2025, and the panel covers a particular slice of U.S. adults, so the absolute numbers will move with sampling and with the shape of Google's product, which keeps changing. The study also does not say what happens to publisher revenue, whether the users who do click are more valuable, or how this looks outside U.S. English. Take the magnitudes as directional and the direction as the part to plan around.

For anyone whose traffic depends on Google referral, the planning question is no longer whether AI Overviews shift behavior but how to be one of the cited sources in the summary, which Pew notes is dominated by Wikipedia, YouTube and Reddit in both AI and standard results. Being inside the answer is becoming the new front page.