Google’s AI Overviews are materially changing how people interact with search results, according to a study published by the Pew Research Center. Using anonymised March 2025 browsing data from 900 U.S. adults, Pew examined 68,879 Google searches and found that an AI-generated summary appeared in 18 percent of queries. When a summary was present, users clicked a traditional search link just 8 percent of the time, roughly half the 15 percent click-through rate on pages that displayed only standard results. Searches that triggered an AI Overview also ended browsing sessions more frequently, with 26 percent of users leaving Google entirely, compared with 16 percent for conventional result pages. Publishers, already grappling with falling referral traffic, have blamed the AI feature for diverting readers away from their sites since Google began rolling it out to U.S. users in May 2024. While the summaries cite outside sources—often Wikipedia, YouTube and Reddit—Pew found users clicked on cited links in just 1 percent of visits. The findings add quantitative support to concerns that generative summaries could erode the economic model that underpins much of the open web. Google disputed the study’s conclusions, saying the research relies on a “flawed methodology and skewed queryset” and that the company continues to send billions of clicks to publishers each day. The debate comes as regulators and media groups scrutinise the search giant’s market power and as rival search engines, such as DuckDuckGo, promote controls that let users minimise AI content. For now, Pew’s data suggests that when Google itself answers a question, users are increasingly content to stop searching.