Feed: Engadget is a web magazine with obsessive daily coverage of everything new in gadgets and consumer electronics
Feed Link: https://www.engadget.com/
---

Title: Google: Actually, AI in Search is driving more queries and higher
quality clicks

Date: Wed, 06 Aug 2025 20:49:46 +0000
Link: https://www.engadget.com/ai/google-actually-a...

Last month, a Pew Research Center report shed light on Google's AI Overviews'
effect on web publishing. In short, the analysis painted an abysmal outlook
for anyone relying on web traffic. But on Wednesday, Google Search head Liz
Reid penned a blog post that puts quite a different spin on things. The
Google VP claims traffic from search to websites is "relatively stable" and
that click quality has increased.

Reid's framing boils down to everything is peachy, and AI is making things
better ΓÇö even for websites! She wrote that Google Search's total organic
click volume to websites has been "relatively" stable year-over-year. Reid
also claimed Google sends more "quality clicks" (visitors who don't quickly
bounce) to websites than a year ago. The company says people are also happier
with the search experience.

The company didn't share any numbers ΓÇö the post has no data whatsoever ΓÇö
to support its claims.

Google's explanation for the rosy outlook? "With AI Overviews, people are
searching more and asking new questions that are often longer and more
complex," Reid wrote. "In addition, with AI Overviews, people are seeing more
links on the page than before. More queries and more links mean more
opportunities for websites to surface and get clicked."

Reid does highlight a shifting landscape. She says user trends are resulting
in lower traffic for some sites and increased traffic for others. Of course,
the Google Search head didn't call out any specific websites. But she claims
forums, videos, podcasts and posts with "authentic voices and first-hand
perspectives" are thriving. Reid added that content like "an in-depth review,
an original post, a unique perspective, or a thoughtful first-person
analysis" does well.

Google / Engadget

The Google VP said people seeking simple Q&A types of searches are leaning
more on AI. "For some questions where people are looking for a quick answer,
like 'when is the next full moon,' people may be satisfied with the initial
AI Overviews response and not click further," Reid wrote. "This has also been
true for other answer features we've added, like the Knowledge Graph or
sports scores. But for many other types of questions, people continue to
click through, as they want to dig deeper into a topic, explore further or
make a purchase. This is why we see click quality increasing ΓÇö an AI
response might provide the lay of the land, but people click to dive deeper
and learn more, and when they do, these clicks are more valuable."

It's quite the contrast from the Pew report. It found that visitors who saw
an AI summary clicked a traditional search result in eight percent of all
visits. Those without an AI summary? They clicked on a traditional result in
15 percent of their visits. As for those source links in AI summaries? Pew
found that only one percent of people clicked on those. Users were also more
likely to end their browsing after visiting a page with an AI summary.

That aligned with comments Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince made in June. He
said search traffic referrals keep plummeting. "The future of the web is
going to be more and more like AI, and that means that people are going to be
reading the summaries of your content, not the original content," he said.
Prince said that a decade ago, Google sent a publisher one visitor for every
two pages it crawled. Early this year, it dropped to one visitor for every
six pages. He said that, in June, it was down to one for every 18.

I can't tell you who to believe. But here's what the ultimate source had to
say:

Google / Engadget

This article originally appeared on Engadget at
https://www.engadget.com/ai/google-actually-a...
queries-and-higher-quality-clicks-204946965.html?src=rss

---
VRSS v2.1.180528