皮尤研究中心的一项新研究表明，谷歌搜索结果顶部的AI生成摘要显著影响了用户点击外部网站的意愿。参与研究的美国成年人数据显示，看到AI概览的用户点击其他网站的比例仅为8%，而没有AI概览的用户为15%。此外，看到AI概览的用户更有可能在26%的页面上结束浏览会话，而没有AI概览的页面为16%。仅有1%的用户点击了AI概览中引用的链接。这一发现与许多发布商的说法一致，他们认为AI概览的出现减少了用户访问其网站的需求，导致流量下降，并迫使一些小型网站调整其运营模式。尽管谷歌方面对此表示否认，认为研究方法存在缺陷，但AI概览对传统网站流量模式的颠覆性影响已引起广泛关注。

📊 AI概览显著降低用户点击外链意愿：皮尤研究中心的数据显示，用户在看到谷歌AI概览后，点击其他网站的比例从15%下降到8%，近乎减半。这表明AI概览在一定程度上满足了用户的信息需求，减少了他们跳转到原始网站的必要性。

📉 增加用户会话结束率：研究发现，AI概览的出现导致用户在26%的页面上结束浏览会话，而没有AI概览的页面这一比例为16%。这意味着AI概览可能让用户更快地获得所需信息，从而缩短了他们的在线搜索旅程。

🔗 引用链接点击率极低：在AI概览中，只有1%的用户会点击引用的链接。这进一步印证了AI概览可能作为信息终点站的角色，而非引导用户发现更广泛内容的工具，这对依赖网站流量的发布商构成了挑战。

🌐 对发布商造成实际影响：许多发布商报告称，自AI概览推出以来，其网站流量有所下降，部分小型独立网站甚至被迫关闭或调整运营模式。这反映了AI技术在改变信息分发方式的同时，也对内容生态系统带来了新的不确定性。

🔍 谷歌方面否认负面影响：谷歌高管否认AI概览导致了网站流量的显著下降，并认为皮尤的研究方法存在缺陷，数据并非代表整体搜索流量。他们强调，总体而言，谷歌仍在向网站输送大量流量。

More research has been published about AI Overviews' effect on declining publisher traffic, athough Google continues to deny it.

A study from the Pew Research Center found that the appearance of Google's AI-generated summaries at the top of the search page significantly impacted outbound clicks to other websites. A group of 900 U.S. adults participating in the study agreed to share their browsing activity. Here are some of the findings from the Pew study:

Google users served an AI Overview clicked on links to other websites 8 percent of the time, nearly half as often as users without an AI Overview (15 percent).

Users were more likely to end their browsing session after encountering an AI Overview. Users ended their sessions on 26 percent of the pages, compared to 16 percent of pages without the AI summaries.

Only 1 percent of users encountering an AI Overview clicked on a cited link in the summary.

The study, which was first published in May and republished earlier this week with additional analysis, echoes what publishers have been saying ever since AI Overviews launched last year. The advent of AI-generated summaries gathered from web data has radically upended the need for users to click to sites in Google search results to find the information they need. That the summaries are sometimes wrong or hallucinated is an entirely different can of worms.

Organic search traffic from major news sites including the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The Washington Post has declined according to SimilarWeb data. And smaller, independent sites say the rollout of AI Overviews has forced them to shut down their sites or entirely reinvent their distribution model as a result of declining traffic, according to a Bloomberg report. Other reports from SEO analysts found the presence AI Overviews reduced clicks to sites, compared to traditional search results.

Google leadership has repeatedly refuted these claims, saying they have not seen a change in outbound clicks. "For any individual publisher, there's lots of reasons why something could fluctuate," Robby Stein VP of product for Google Search said in a May interview with Mashable. "We don't really look at specific publishers in that way. We think about it really in the aggregate."

In an interview with The Verge, CEO Sundar Pichai addressed claims of declining traffic, saying "we are sending traffic to a broader source of people. People may be surfacing more content, looking at more content, so someone may individually see less."

In response to the Pew findings, Google told The Register that they believe the study "uses a flawed methodology and skewed queryset that is not representative of Search traffic," before adding "We consistently direct billions of clicks to websites daily and have not observed significant drops in aggregate web traffic as is being suggested."