Google's AI-generated summaries, called AI Overviews, showed up in 43 percent of US searches this year. A year earlier that number was 15 percent. That is close to a threefold increase in twelve months, according to a new report from market research firm Similarweb.
At the same time, Google's more conversational search tool, AI Mode, is pulling in far more visits. Monthly visits to the web version grew from 126 million last June to 279 million this May. Google says the tool has now passed one billion monthly users, though that is a different way of counting and cannot be compared directly to Similarweb's traffic figures.
Here is the bigger shift behind these numbers: people are typing longer, more natural questions into Google instead of short keyword phrases. Similarweb found the average search got 5.4 percent longer after AI Mode launched. Instead of typing "best hiking boots," people now ask full questions and follow up, the way they would with a chatbot.
For most businesses, this matters because of what happens after the search. When Google or an AI answer already gives the user what they need, many people never click through to a website at all. Independent research backs this up.
Research firm Ahrefs found that when an AI Overview appears, clicks to the top ranking web page drop by 58 percent compared to before AI summaries existed. Online learning company Chegg has told regulators its traffic fell 49 percent over one year, largely because AI Overviews now answer the homework questions that used to send students to its site.
The picture gets stranger when you look closer. Similarweb found that the pages AI tools pull information from are rarely the same pages people land on if they do click. About 65 percent of the web pages cited inside ChatGPT answers were deep product or article pages.
But when people actually clicked through, close to 59 percent landed on a company's homepage instead. Your detailed content may be feeding the answer, while your homepage gets whatever traffic is left over.
Publishers are pushing back in two ways. Rolling Stone and Billboard owner Penske Media has sued Google, arguing AI Overviews use its journalism while cutting the clicks that used to fund it. Separately, Cloudflare now lets website owners charge AI companies a fee before their automated crawlers can read a page.
Google has responded by adding more direct links and source previews inside its AI answers. It has not published data showing whether that actually restored lost clicks.
None of this means businesses should stop trying to show up in search. It means the old measure of success, ranking high and counting clicks, is no longer the whole story.
Being mentioned accurately inside an AI answer can still shape what a customer decides to buy, even if they never visit the site that day. The businesses that adapt fastest will be the ones that stop asking only whether they rank well, and start asking whether they are described correctly when an AI is asked about their industry.