The researchers Agarwal and Sen ran an interesting field study with 1,065 US Chrome users in January this year. The users had to install an extension toggling AI Overviews off and on. The paper is the first randomized evidence on what this actually means for publishers.
Google’s standing defense has been that AIOs reduce clicks but improve quality of the remaining ones, filtering out low-intent traffic and educating the user with better search results beforehand.
Well…
On queries where AIOs appeared, outbound clicks fell 39.8%. Across all searches, the drop was 18.5%. When AIOs were removed, the recovered clicks showed no quality difference: bounce rates and time on page were unchanged. The traffic from Google was nothing more than ordinary traffic.
Also worth noting: Links within AIOs generated only 7.1% of outbound clicks. Very telling for everyone who is betting on GEO as the next big thing in search marketing.