The Impact of AI Summaries on Website Traffic
The Pew Research Center conducted a study to investigate the effects of AI summaries on website traffic. The study involved tracking the browsing behavior of over 900 adults in March 2025, resulting in a dataset of 68,879 unique Google search queries. The findings of the study confirmed what many publishers and SEOs have been claiming: AI summaries do not send traffic back to websites.
Methodology
The study used an online browsing tracker to record the browsing behavior of the participants. The tracker collected data on the search queries, the type of search results displayed, and the user’s interaction with the search results. The dataset contained 12,593 queries that triggered an AI summary.
The Effects of AI Summaries on Website Traffic
The study found that users who encountered an AI summary were less likely to click on a link and visit a website compared to users who saw only a standard search result. Only 8% of users who encountered an AI summary clicked a link, whereas users who saw a standard search result clicked on a link 15% of the time.
User Interaction with AI Summaries
The study also found that users rarely clicked on links within an AI summary. Only 1% of users clicked on a link within an AI summary, indicating that AI summaries are not effective in driving traffic to websites.
The Impact of AI Summaries on Web Engagement
Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, has stated that AI summaries are not having a negative impact on the web ecosystem. However, the study’s findings contradict this claim. The data shows that AI summaries cause users to engage less with web content.
User Behavior After Encountering an AI Summary
The study found that users who encountered an AI summary were more likely to end their browsing session entirely. This happened on 26% of pages with an AI summary, compared to 16% of pages with only traditional search results.
User Interaction with Traditional Search Results
The study also found that users who encountered an AI summary were less likely to click on a traditional search result. Users who encountered an AI summary clicked on a traditional search result link in 8% of all visits, whereas users who did not encounter an AI summary clicked on a search result link in 15% of visits.
Dominant Platforms and AI Summaries
The study found that Wikipedia, YouTube, and Reddit are the most frequently cited sources in both Google AI summaries and standard search results. These three sites accounted for 15% of the sources listed in AI summaries and 17% of the sources listed in standard search results.
Citation Links in AI Summaries
The study found that users who saw an AI summary rarely clicked on the citation links to the websites that the AI summary linked to. This confirms the concerns of publishers and SEOs that AI-driven search erodes web traffic and concentrates attention on a few dominant platforms.
Conclusion
The study’s findings confirm that AI summaries are having a negative impact on website traffic. The data shows that AI summaries sharply reduce clicks to websites, with only 8% of users clicking on a link and only 1% engaging with citations in AI answers. The study’s findings also confirm that AI summaries cause users to engage less with web content, with users more likely to end their browsing session or stay within Google’s ecosystem rather than visiting independent websites. These findings have significant implications for publishers and SEOs, highlighting the need to adapt to the changing search landscape and find new ways to drive traffic to their websites.