SourcePew Research Center
PublishedJuly 22, 2025
TypeIndependent research
Sample900 U.S. adults, 68,879 Google searches (March 2025)
The short version: Expect fewer clicks on long, question-style informational queries. Plan content for those queries as brand exposure, and put your conversion value on queries that still click.
What they studied
Pew tracked the real browsing of 900 U.S. adults who agreed to share it, for all of March 2025. It then re-ran each of their 68,879 Google searches to see which ones showed an AI summary, and looked at what each person did next.
Key findings
- People clicked a regular result on 8% of visits to pages with an AI summary, against 15% when there was no summary.
- Links inside the AI summary itself were clicked on about 1% of visits.
- Sessions ended on 26% of visits to pages with a summary, against 16% without one.
- About 18% of searches showed an AI summary. Only 8% of one or two word searches did, rising to 53% for searches of 10 or more words and 60% for searches phrased as questions.
- Wikipedia, YouTube and Reddit were the most cited sources, both in summaries and in regular results.
Key learnings
- Expect fewer clicks on long, question-style informational queries. Plan content for those queries as brand exposure, and put your conversion value on queries that still click.
- Track click-through rate by query type in Search Console, not just total clicks, so you can see where summaries are taking the click.
- Short, specific queries still send most of the clicks. Do not abandon them for long-tail question content alone.
Things to keep in mind
- One month of data, and Google only: Pew could not reliably detect AI summaries on other engines.
- Searches were re-run in April to capture the summaries, so a few results may differ from what people actually saw.
- It measures behavior, not satisfaction: a search that ends without a click may still have answered the question.
Read it alongside
- AI Overviews and click-through rate: 15 months of client data (Seer Interactive, 2025)
- AI Overviews and the top-ranking page: 300,000 keywords (Ahrefs, 2025)
- AI features and your website (Google's own guidance) (Google Search Central, 2025)
Source
Independent research by Athena Chapekis and Anna Lieb, published by Pew Research Center, July 22, 2025.
We read the source and checked every figure on this page against it on October 13, 2026. Summaries and learnings are ours. Spotted an error? Tell us.
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