Google’s AI Overviews are seemingly designed to shift user clicks away from websites and nudge them towards Google ads. Zero-click answers leave many publishers struggling.

If you type a question into Google search, there’s a very good chance Google will answer with an AI Overview (AIO). 

You may see links in those answers. Being an experienced searcher, you might think those links lead to sources and websites, like links have always worked.

But you’re probably wrong. 

Many links currently in Google’s AIOs lead to other Google searches, even when it doesn’t make sense.

Let’s demonstrate. I’ve searched for “Does Milwaukee have a lifetime warranty?” (Milwaukee is manufacturer of power tools.)

Google kindly inserted four links into the AI answer, including one to “Hand Tools” and another for “Warranty Process.” Do any of those links lead to an official page about Milwaukee’s warranty?

No, my dear reader, they do not.

What, pray tell, do they lead to?

The answer is a mishmash of mostly irrelevant pages, including a full-page layout of battery ads.

Not exactly what we were looking for.

If Milwaukee wants a click here, their best bet may be to pay Google’s ad ransom.

Which is a bad deal for Milwaukee, because Google can generate these magical AI answers, in part, off the back of Milwaukee’s content.

The Broken Grand Bargain

Google once had a “Grand Bargain” with publishers: it could scrape publishers’ web content for free, and in exchange, it would send a significant portion of its search traffic back to publishers. 

However, with AIOs, Google continues to scrape all that publisher content freely, sending an increasingly smaller amount of traffic back to websites and artificially steering a larger portion of clicks toward sponsored content.

Here’s a visual of how it works.

For Milwaukee—and the rest of us—that creates more opportunities for competitors to bid for visibility on the AI answers created with Milwaukee’s content, all without Milwaukee seeing a click. 

How much traffic is lost to AIOs? Consider the following stats:

• A study by Amsive found that keywords with AIOs saw more than a 15% reduction in clicks
• A study by Ahrefs of 300,000 keywords showed a massive 34.5% drop in CTR when AIOs were present
• A study published by Seer Interactive showed CTRs for keywords that triggered AIOs drop 54.6% over 12 months (1.41% to 0.64%)

Note: These studies used different methodologies, so this isn’t an apples-to-oranges comparison.

Not that traffic from Google search is great under ideal conditions. Research from Kevin Indig shows that even when no AIO is present, only 28% of Google searches result in a publisher website visit.

With AIOs, website clicks drop to 24% per search result.

The High Cost To Publishers

In the past, Google liked to claim that it sent increasing traffic to the open web, but today, many publishers remain skeptical.

While giant publishers like Reddit see exponential traffic growth from Google, many independent publishers barely get by. 

Still, Google continues to extract data from these smaller publishers to train its AI systems. Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince says that ten years ago, “for every two pages of a website that Google scraped they would send you one visitor.” 

But Prince says today, while Google continues to crawl and extract data at the same rate, it “now it takes six pages scraped to get one visitor.“

ChatGPT and other generative AI engines are even worse in this aspect, sending only a fraction of traffic to publishers per query compared to Google.

The Only Winner is Google

Google is not without its struggles.

Each quarter, it must satisfy Wall Street with new dazzling earnings, all while fighting off antitrust enforcement across several continents.

The good news for Google is that data from Similarweb shows that US visits to Google have increased by 9% since AIOs launched.

The bad news is that users don’t stick around as long. Similarweb reports a -1% drop in session length.

Users are visiting Google more, but not sticking around.

Google has to use those precious visitor moments however it can. As always, that means directing them to more ads.

So far, the strategy continues to pay off. Google’s Q1 revenue for 2025 was up 8% year-over-year.

While Google continues to push higher and higher profits, the danger for publishers is obvious.

The threat to Google is that publishers may reduce their investment in creating original content – content that Google needs to train its AI. And Google needs original content – they are already working to mitigate the flood of AI slop that wants to fill its search results. 

For Google, this may seem like a slight headache compared to the crushing weight of regulatory pressure working to break up the entire company. 

But maybe, just maybe, if Google hadn’t been so greedy and hadn’t tried to keep so much for itself, it might not be in this position in the first place.