Google's AI Overviews are making a longstanding SEO problem more acute: a search result can deliver visibility without delivering a website visit. Pew Research Center found that users were substantially less likely to click links when an AI-generated summary appeared in Google results, raising a practical question for publishers and enterprise marketing teams. If a brand is surfaced in an answer but receives little measurable referral traffic, what should count as search success?
The answer is not to dismiss AI Overview visibility. It is to separate answer presence from audience acquisition. Search teams that continue to rely primarily on rankings, impressions and organic clicks risk treating distinct outcomes as if they were interchangeable. Google's evolving results pages require more deliberate measurement, clearer ownership and content governance that accounts for AI-mediated discovery.
What Pew's findings say about AI Overviews and clicks
In its March 2025 analysis of Google search behavior, Pew found that AI Overviews appeared in about 18% of searches. When an AI summary was present, about 8% of searches led to a click on a traditional search result, while roughly 1% led to a click on a link within the AI summary. Across Google searches overall, Pew reported that roughly two-thirds ended without a click.
