AI impact on website traffic shown by illustration of hand on a computer mouse
Not clicking: AI summaries are killing onward traffic (image: Midjourney)

This is what AI is doing to your website traffic

New research has shown the dramatic effect AI summaries are having on website traffic generated from Google.

The Pew Research Center conducted a study of the web behaviour of 900 US-based users in March this year. Part of the study looked at the impact of the AI summaries that are now appearing at the top of the search results pages, often providing detailed answers to search queries without requiring the user to click to the website(s) where the information was collated from.

The study analysed almost 69,000 different Google searches. On searches that didn’t contain an AI summary, the user clicked on a link to a website 15% of the time. When an AI summary did appear, that click rate dropped to only 8%.

Furthermore, on pages without an AI summary, the user ended their browsing session only 16% of the time after they’d read the search results. When the AI summary was present, that figure rose to 26%, suggesting the AI summary contained all the information they needed more often.

There’s not even solace for website owners in the links to the original source that are often provided with AI summaries. Pew found these were clicked only 1% of the time.

Wither the web?

The research underlines what website owners have known for a while now: AI is having a massively detrimental effect on traffic generated from search engines, which for many web publishers is their primary source of traffic.

That’s causing major headaches for web publishers, especially those relying on advertising revenue to drive income. Ironically, it’s Google who also sells advertising web space on many websites, meaning the company’s AI summaries are likely hurting its own revenues just as much as those of web publishers. If fewer people are visiting websites, fewer people are clicking on ads, thus hurting Google’s bottom line.

Google can soften that blow with sales of its Gemini AI products, which are heavily promoted from within search results. For many web publishers, there’s no easy way to replace that lost revenue, threatening the future of many websites.

Of course, without fresh content to feed the AI, there’s a risk the quality of the results generated by the AI summaries diminishes. AI is eating the web. It may eventually eat itself.

About The Author

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Barry Collins

Barry has 25 years of experience working on national newspapers, websites and magazines. He was editor of PC Pro and is co-editor and co-owner of BigTechQuestion.com. He has published a number of articles on TechFinitive covering data, innovation and cybersecurity.

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