Google now shows AI summaries with source links baked in — but does anyone actually click those links?

This explores whether the source links inside AI Overviews actually send readers on to the original sites, or whether they mostly sit there unclicked while the summary does the work. The corpus has no study that tracks clicks on the citation links themselves. Every measurement of total traffic, though, points the same way: the overview absorbs the visit, and the citations don't win much of it back.

The strongest evidence is causal. In a randomized field experiment with over 1,000 users, AI Overviews cut clicks to publisher sites by 39.8 percent. Users also reported no better search quality in exchange Do AI Overviews actually reduce clicks to publisher sites?. Industry data looks similar from the outside. Ahrefs found that the top-ranked result loses about 58 percent of its clickthrough rate when an Overview appears above it How much are AI Overviews actually reducing organic search clicks?. Wikipedia makes a useful case because it's one of the sources Overviews cite most. Comparing English Wikipedia (exposed to Overviews) with German and French (not yet exposed) shows roughly a 5 percent drop in search referrals Does AI search summaries divert traffic away from Wikipedia?. The question is answered before anyone needs to click. Publishers can see this coming: news executives expect search referrals to fall 40–43 percent over three years Will AI Overviews reduce search referral traffic to publishers?.

Why don't the citations make up the difference? An eye-tracking study shows where attention goes. The Overview now holds the 'golden triangle' at the top of the page, and the share of attention going to the first organic result fell from 31 percent to 9 percent. Readers trusted the Overview as much as the ranked links Where do searchers look when AI Overviews appear?. If you trust the summary, you have little reason to check its sources. A finding from Search Arena points to something less obvious: users rate answers higher when they carry more citations, and irrelevant citations raise that rating almost as much as relevant ones Do users trust citations more when there are simply more of them?. So citations in AI answers may work less as doorways and more as badges. They signal 'this is sourced' without anyone needing to go through them.

This isn't inevitable, and design is part of the reason. In a 372-person experiment, a persistent sidebar of sources helped people think more critically as the number of citations grew, while compact hover cards weakened their engagement with the sources Can interface design reverse citation overload's harm to critical thinking?. How citations are displayed shapes whether anyone uses them. One more angle comes from law. A Munich court ruled that Google is directly liable for false claims in an AI Overview, treating the summary as Google's own speech rather than an index pointing elsewhere Can courts hold Google liable for AI Overview false claims?. That fits the traffic data: once the summary is the content, the cited sources are no longer where the reader is headed.