Google AI Overviews have negligible impact on traffic, say publishers

Two large publishers, Dotdash Meredith and Ziff Davis, say Google AI Overviews haven’t significantly impacted their traffic.

Here’s what the IAC (owner of Dotash) wrote its Q2 2024 shareholder letter:

“Google began to roll out AI Overviews in mid-May, the impact on our traffic has been negligible. Referrals from Google search queries produce less than half of our traffic, and based on our analysis, AI-generated answers are being served on roughly 15% of searches across our categories, with the highest frequency in Health, Technology, and Finance. Click-through rate differentials between pages with and without AI Overviews are minor so far, but it is still early and products change quickly, so the past isn’t prologue.”

IAC letter

And here’s what Ziff Davis CEO Vivek Shah said on the company’s earnings call:

“We analyzed thousands of queries across our key domains that generate the lion’s share of our organic search referrals and the percentage of times that an AI Overview appeared. It fell to 8%, meaning 92% of the time the search engine results page did not include an AI Overview for the queries that matter to us most. Analysis by other industry experts indicate a similar percentage of overall searches resulting in AI Overviews….“At this point, we don’t see it as a significant change to the search experience.”

ZD earnings call

You don’t need to be signed in. In another development, Google AI Overviews will now appear for all users in the United States, even if they are not signed into their Google account. Google has confirmed that AI Overviews are available for signed-out users in the U.S.

Google is also expanding access to AI Overviews to United Kingdom, India, Japan, Indonesia, Mexico and Brazil, while also expanding Search Labs AI Overview experiment features and access.

Links and citations. Google has also rolled out a new right-hand link display for AI Overviews on desktop, with a mobile version of this accessed by tapping the site icons on the upper right of the mobile search results. Plus, Google will test showing “addition of links to relevant web pages directly within the text of AI Overviews,” the company announced. This is in addition to the links Google already shows in the AI Overviews with those AI Overview link cards. Google said this makes “it even easier for people to click out and visit sites that interest them.”

Why we care. Generative AI has just begun reshaping search and AI will continue to do so over the next decade. AI Overviews (and Search Generative Experience before it) caused a lot of anxiety for SEOs, publishers and content creators. So it’s helpful to get some insight into how publishers are being impacted in these early days.

Additional reporting by Barry Schwartz.