Google’s experimental “AI Overviews” are significantly curbing users’ willingness to visit external websites, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of the March 2025 browsing activity of 900 U.S. adults. The study found that search sessions featuring an AI summary generated a click-through rate of 8%, roughly half the 15% recorded when no summary appeared. Fewer than 1% of users clicked on the links embedded within the summaries themselves, and 26% ended their session after seeing an AI Overview, compared with 16% for standard results. Publishers, educators and other content creators say the findings reinforce concerns that AI-generated answers keep readers inside Google’s ecosystem, threatening advertising and subscription revenue that depends on direct traffic. Separate data from analytics firm Similarweb suggest a more complex picture. AI chatbots and assistants—including OpenAI’s ChatGPT—drove an estimated 1.13 billion referrals to the world’s 1,000 largest websites in June 2025, a 357% increase from a year earlier. Referrals to news outlets alone jumped 770% over the same period, with ChatGPT accounting for roughly four-fifths of all AI-originated visits. Despite the surge, Google Search remains the predominant source of referral traffic, delivering about 191 billion visits to the top 1,000 sites in June. The contrasting datasets highlight the shifting dynamics of online discovery as AI tools both divert clicks within search results and, at the same time, emerge as a growing traffic channel in their own right.