585
Surprising no one, new research says AI Overviews cause massive drop in search clicks
(arstechnica.com)
this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2025
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Technology
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right i stopped using "search" that muddles my answers with LLM so how would they get my clicks, they lost the customer
I've been liking kagi. Sucks you have to pay.
Kagi is worth it though. Been paying for 3-months and the ability to search, get info, click through quickly is a breath of fresh air. It's what Google USED to be. Plus it downranks pages with excessive trackers, you can prefer or omit websites from results based on personal preference, and it'll even alert you when websites have paywalled answers. The Kagi free trial is all I needed to be convinced.
Ended up subscribing. Holy shit this is a gamechanger!
Crazy how good it is, right?
Google enshittified so gradually, we never even noticed.
Maybe I should just do it because it did make the web enjoyable again. Like you said, I loved Google 15 years ago! Sad its so shit now
If you aren't paying, you're the product.
What sucks is that I can't unbundle their AI shit from my subscription
At least you can disable
same actually, Kagi is pretty solid
This study isn't about total clicks, or a drop in traffic to Google caused by people not liking the ai overview. It's about for each Google search that was executed, how often did someone click on a link. Without ai it was 15% and with ai it is 8%. So if anything its proving the customers like the ai overviews and believe they are getting enough from them to answer their query.
Sure there are probably a couple people who see the overview at the top and hate ai so much they leave Google without clicking anything, but those people will probably only do that once or twice before they stop using Google entirely or disable the feature, and thus wouldn't count much in the data about ai overview searches.
so i have to flip them off harder somehow 🤔