Study: Google AI Overviews cut publisher clicks nearly 40%

A field experiment by Saharsh Agarwal (Indian School of Business) and Ananya Sen (Carnegie Mellon) randomly assigned 1,065 U.S. desktop searchers to see Google results with or without AI Overviews over two weeks in early 2026. Removing the AI Overview raised outbound clicks to external sites from 0.37 to 0.62 per search — a nearly 40% reduction when the AI Overview is present — while self-reported search satisfaction held flat at 4.0 out of 5 either way, per Digital Content Next’s write-up of the paper, first posted to SSRN in April 2026 and revised in June. Citations inside AI Overviews recovered little of the lost traffic: just 7.1% of outbound clicks on AIO-bearing search pages came from links inside the AI-generated answer itself, with the rest going to ordinary organic results on the same page.