Leadership1 publisher2 min readPublished
Reader who praises Google's AI Overviews says he rarely clicks the links now
Google says total organic click volume has been relatively stable year over year, while large US media companies sue over lost traffic. A Guardian reader callout shows how both of those claims can hold at once.
The Board Room · Leadership desk
What happened
- Google has put AI Overviews at the top of its results, so users scroll past a chatbot summary to reach the same list of links the search page has always shown.
- Academic studies are finding that people navigate less to sites beyond Google when an AI Overview answers the question well enough, even when the summary cites the sites that fed it.
- Google said it had not seen a decline in aggregate traffic and that accusations to the contrary are based on "flawed methodologies".
- The Guardian asked readers how searching has changed and published their answers in groups for people who think Google improved, people who think it got worse, and one who quit it.
Compiled by The Board RoomSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- contradiction Google's stability claim is measured across all websites while the lawsuits are about particular sites, so both records can be accurate and an individual publisher's budget can still miss by a wide margin.
- constraint When the summary answers the question, a site cannot win the click back by improving the page, because the reader's decision now happens above the link list.
- decision Next year's content and marketing forecasts have to be set before the litigation or the studies produce per-site click data anyone can plan against.
- exposure Businesses that bill against click volume are exposed to readers who report being better served and clicking less, and traffic-based revenue models score those two as separate events.
Liz Reid's defence is a statement about a total. Google's vice-president of search wrote last year that "Total organic click volume from Google Search to websites has been relatively stable year-over-year" [9]. A publisher's budget is built on one site's click count, and a stable sum can sit on top of a heavy redistribution among the sites inside it. The Guardian's account does not break out that distribution.
The most useful line in the reader callout [10] came from someone who likes the change. Mark Johnson, a 52-year-old software engineer in London, told the Guardian: "It's made Google search much better, I find that I rarely actually click on the website links any more" [11]. That is the same behaviour the academic studies describe, reported from the inside: the satisfied search and the lost click are one event [4].
Readers on the other side describe effort. Sean Peters, a document processor in Portland, said "Google AI obscures sources and tries to claim information it did not create while diverting traffic from the sources it steals from" [12]. Jon Wilkinson, a personal trainer in Manchester, said "we're no longer able to turn off the AI summary results" [13]. Chris Gibson in Dundee said "Worse. I have disabled AI overviews using an extension" [14]. Ewan Herbert, an English teacher in Japan, said that when he is feeling particularly bitter he remembers to add the -ai tag to his search [15].
A reader callout proves nothing about traffic. Of the twelve named responses the Guardian printed under its better and worse headings, eight sat under "Google is better now" [17]. Those twelve are an editor's selection. The evidence that has to carry the traffic argument is elsewhere: the unnamed academic studies the Guardian describes [4], and the suits filed by large US media companies alleging that AI summaries redirected and reduced their traffic [7].
So the operating problem is sequencing. Suits of that size will not settle this quarter, and the studies as described measure navigation behaviour [4]. The forecast gets made without the number that would settle it. Cut click-dependent revenue in the plan now and you may under-resource a channel that holds; leave the plan alone and you find the shortfall mid-year, after the spend is committed against clicks that are often a site's single largest source of ad revenue [5]. Publishers and site owners are already absorbing a sustained decline [6]. In May, Google said more AI is coming [3].
What to watch
- Whether the US media companies' suits produce discovery on per-site click volume instead of aggregate figures.
- Whether Google publishes click data broken out by site or category, or repeats the aggregate stability claim unchanged.
- Whether the academic studies the Guardian describes, which the article leaves unnamed, are identified and replicated.