Pew Research Confirms Google AI Overviews Is Eroding Web Ecosystem

Pew Research Center tracked real web browsing behavior and confirmed what many publishers and SEOs have claimed: AI Overviews does not send traffic back to websites. The results show that the damage caused by AI summaries to the web ecosystem is as bad as or worse than is commonly understood.

Methodology

The Pew Research study tracked over 900 adults who consented to installing an online browsing tracker to record their browsing behavior in the month of March 2025. The dataset contains 68,879 unique Google search queries, and a total of 12,593…