[HN Gopher] AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks
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AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks
Author : jonbaer
Score : 57 points
Date : 2025-07-23 19:50 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| skywhopper wrote:
| Which is of course Google's short-sighted goal. See also their
| push to switch to full "AI mode" search which doesn't show
| results at all.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| It's a weird goal to me. Like, what's their end game here?
| Offer to manipulate the AI responses for ad money? Product
| placement in the summaries? I would hope those placements have
| to be disclosed as advertising, and it would immediately break
| trust in anything their AI outputs so surely that would only
| continue to harm them in the long run, no?
|
| ~57% of their revenue is from search advertising. How do they
| plan on replacing that?
| flashgordon wrote:
| So youd be surprised and scared - the Ad PMs I know are
| totally salivating at this. Their angle is "SEO is no more -
| it is GEO now". GenAI Engine Optimization. Welcome to the
| Futurama Internet Future!
| EarlKing wrote:
| "Futurama does not endorse the COOOOOOL crime of fraudulent
| misrepresentation!"
|
| Seriously, Futurama and Cyberpunk and 1984 were all
| supposed to be warnings... not how-to manuals.
| xt00 wrote:
| Yea it is tricky for them -- the old model of "search, see
| google text / link ad, scroll, click website, scroll, see
| some ads on that page as well, done" will be replaced with
| "search, see google text / link ad, read AI result, 'and here
| are some relevant websites'" -- where all of the incentives
| there will be to "go into more depth" on the websites that
| are linked there.
| dado3212 wrote:
| Related, but to whichever PM put the "AI Mode" on the far left
| side of the toolbar, thus breaking the muscle memory from
| clicking "All" to get back from "Images", I expect some thanks
| for unintentionally boosting your CTR metrics.
| fsh wrote:
| That decision probably paid someone's new car. The KPIs will be
| excellent. Who cares about what the users might have wanted to
| do with their clicks.
| bgwalter wrote:
| You can apparently disable these annoying and useless "AI"
| overviews by cursing in the query:
|
| https://arstechnica.com/google/2025/01/just-give-me-the-fing...
| x0x0 wrote:
| appending a -"fuck google #{insert slur of choice here}" to my
| search results has improved them. Then I wonder why I do this
| to myself and ponder going back to kagi.
| riantogo wrote:
| Or just append with -ai => "how to pick a running shoe -ai"
| oezi wrote:
| The tricky thing for Google will be to do this and not kill their
| cash cow ad business.
| pryelluw wrote:
| Not tricky at all.
|
| This is a new line of business that provides them with more ad
| space to sell.
|
| If the overview becomes a trusted source of information, then
| all they need to do is inject ads in the overviews. They
| already sort of dye that. Imagine it as a sort of text based
| product placement.
| kozikow wrote:
| Ads inside LLMs (e.g. pay $ to boost your product in LLM
| recommendation) is going to be a big thing.
|
| My guess is that Google/OpenAI are eyeing each other - whoever
| does this first.
|
| Why would that work? It's a proven business model. Example: I
| use LLMs for product research (e.g. which washing machine to
| buy). Retailer pays if link to their website is included in the
| results. Don't want to pay? Then redirect the user to buy it on
| Walmart instead of Amazon.
| Gigachad wrote:
| I'd guess that the searches where AI overviews are useful and
| the searches where companies are buying ads are probably fairly
| distinct. If you search for plumbers near you, they won't show
| an AI overview, while if you search "Why are plants green?", no
| one was buying ads on that.
| HPsquared wrote:
| I've seen blatantly wrong stuff in that overview too many times,
| I just ignore it now.
| Jare wrote:
| To be fair, the actual results are often even worse. I'm pretty
| sure we're close to the point where our favorite AI prompt
| replaces classic googling. While it will get a lot of the
| answer wrong, it will lead to the right result faster than
| plain searches. If nothing else, because refining our search at
| the AI prompt will be way easier than in classic google. Google
| knows and needs to stay on top of this paradigm change, but I
| guess doesn't know how to monetize AI search yet so it doesn't
| want to force the change (yet).
| wkat4242 wrote:
| To be fair, Google's actual search couldn't be much worse than it
| was lately. It's like they really try to get all the spam,
| clickbait and scams right at the top.
|
| The AI overview sucks but it can't really be a lot worse than
| that :)
| yfw wrote:
| Maybe if the search wasnt full of ads and scams
| j45 wrote:
| This means searches are still happening, just being routed
| elsewhere?
|
| I noticed Google's new AI summary let's me click on a link in the
| summary and the links are posted to the right.
|
| Those clicks are available, might not be discovered yet, curious
| though if those show up anywhere as data.
|
| Google being able to create summaries off actual web search
| results will be an interesting take compared to other models
| trying to get the same done without similar search results at
| their disposal.
|
| The new search engine could be google doing the search and
| compiling the results for us how we do manually.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| > Google being able to create summaries off actual web search
| results will be an interesting take compared to other models
| trying to get the same done without similar search results at
| their disposal.
|
| And may get them in some anti-trust trouble once publishers
| start fighting back, similar to AMP, or their thing with Genius
| and song lyrics. Turns out site owners don't like when Google
| takes their content and displays it to users without forcing
| said users to click through to the actual website.
| ghushn3 wrote:
| I subscribe to Kagi. It's been worth it to have no ads and the
| ability to uprank/downrank sites.
|
| And there's no AI garbage sitting in the top of the engine.
| slau wrote:
| You can opt-in to get an LLM response by phrasing your queries
| as a question.
|
| Searching for "who is Roger rabbit" gives me Wikipedia, IMDb
| and film site as results.
|
| Searching for "who is Roger rabbit?" gives me a "quick answer"
| LLM-generated response: "Roger Rabbit is a fictional animated
| anthropomorphic rabbit who first appeared in Gary K. Wolf's
| 1981 novel..." followed by a different set of results. It seems
| the results are influenced by the sources/references the LLM
| generated.
| standardUser wrote:
| I'm more interested now than ever. A lot of my time spent
| searching is for obscure or hard-to-find stuff, and in the past
| smaller search engines were useless for this. But most of my
| searches are quick and the primary thing slowing me down are
| Google product managers. So maybe Kagi is worth a try?
| voltaireodactyl wrote:
| I think you might be happily surprised for sure.
| ars wrote:
| The AI overview doesn't (for me) cause a big drop in clicking on
| sites.
|
| But AI as a product most certainly does! I was trying to figure
| out why a certain AWS tool stopped working, and Gemini figured it
| out for me. In the past I would have browsed multiple forums to
| figure out it.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Liberating me from "search clicks" is not a bad thing at all. I
| suspect many of us though don't even go to <search engine> anyway
| but ask an LLM directly.
| achierius wrote:
| It's fundamentally self-destructive though. In time, the sites
| which rely on search clicks for revenue will essentially cease
| to be paid for their work, and in many cases will therefore
| stop publishing the high-quality material that you're looking
| for.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I assumed that, after having using LLMs myself increasingly,
| that LLM's killing search was inevitable anyway. Further I
| assume that Google recognizes it as well and would rather at
| least remain somewhat relevant?
|
| Google search, as others have mentioned in this thread,
| increasingly fails to give me high-quality material anyway.
| Mostly it's just pages of SEO spam. I prefer that the LLM eat
| that instead of me (just spit back up the relevant stuff,
| thankyouverymuch).
|
| Honestly though, increasingly the internet for me is 1) a
| distraction from doing real work 2) YouTube (see 1) and 3) a
| wonderful library called archive.org (which, if I could grab
| a local snapshot would make leaving the internet altogether
| much, much easier).
| blibble wrote:
| no reason not to block Googlebot now...
| maxdo wrote:
| Pay per click model Should die , it's really ugly world where you
| need to fight through loads of ads to get tiny bit of
| information.
|
| People will go to museums to see how complicated pre-ai era was
| Gigachad wrote:
| Yep, there's so much hate for people who don't read past the
| headline, but if you actually click on the articles the
| websites are almost unusable.
| washadjeffmad wrote:
| The overviews are also wrong and difficult to get fixed.
|
| Google AI has been listing incorrect internal extensions causing
| departments to field calls for people trying to reach unrelated
| divisions and services, listing times and dates of events that
| don't exist at our addresses that people are showing up to, and
| generally misdirecting and misguiding people who really need
| correct information from a truth source like our websites.
|
| We have to track each and every one of these problems down,
| investigate and evaluate whether we can reproduce them, give them
| a "thumbs down" to then be able to submit "feedback", with no
| assurance it will be fixed in a timely manner and no obvious way
| to opt ourselves out of it entirely. For something beyond our
| consent and control.
|
| It's worse than when Google and Yelp would create unofficial
| business profiles on your behalf and then held them hostage until
| you registered with their services to change them.
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