AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks
arstechnica.com
AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks
1–10 of 872 posts
Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks
#2Which is of course Google’s short-sighted goal. See also their push to switch to full “AI mode” search which doesn’t show results at all.
Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks
#3Related, but to whichever PM put the "AI Mode" on the far left side of the toolbar, thus breaking the muscle memory from clicking "All" to get back from "Images", I expect some thanks for unintentionally boosting your CTR metrics.
Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks
#4You can apparently disable these annoying and useless "AI" overviews by cursing in the query:
https://arstechnica.com/google/2025/01/just-give-me-the-fing...
Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks
#5Which is of course Google’s short-sighted goal. See also their push to switch to full “AI mode” search which doesn’t show results at all.
It's a weird goal to me. Like, what's their end game here? Offer to manipulate the AI responses for ad money? Product placement in the summaries? I would hope those placements have to be disclosed as advertising, and it would immediately break trust in anything their AI outputs so surely that would only continue to harm them in the long run, no?
~57% of their revenue is from search advertising. How do they plan on replacing that?
Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks
#6The tricky thing for Google will be to do this and not kill their cash cow ad business.
Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks
#7Which is of course Google’s short-sighted goal. See also their push to switch to full “AI mode” search which doesn’t show results at all.
It's a weird goal to me. Like, what's their end game here? Offer to manipulate the AI responses for ad money? Product placement in the summaries? I would hope those placements have to be disclosed as advertising, and it would immediately break trust in anything their AI outputs so surely that would only continue to harm them in the long run, no? ~57% of their revenue is from search advertising. How do they plan on re…
So youd be surprised and scared - the Ad PMs I know are totally salivating at this. Their angle is "SEO is no more - it is GEO now". GenAI Engine Optimization. Welcome to the Futurama Internet Future!
Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks
#8I've seen blatantly wrong stuff in that overview too many times, I just ignore it now.
Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks
#9Which is of course Google’s short-sighted goal. See also their push to switch to full “AI mode” search which doesn’t show results at all.
It's a weird goal to me. Like, what's their end game here? Offer to manipulate the AI responses for ad money? Product placement in the summaries? I would hope those placements have to be disclosed as advertising, and it would immediately break trust in anything their AI outputs so surely that would only continue to harm them in the long run, no? ~57% of their revenue is from search advertising. How do they plan on re…
Yea it is tricky for them -- the old model of "search, see google text / link ad, scroll, click website, scroll, see some ads on that page as well, done" will be replaced with "search, see google text / link ad, read AI result, 'and here are some relevant websites'" -- where all of the incentives there will be to "go into more depth" on the websites that are linked there.
Re: AI overviews cause massive drop in search clicks
#10To be fair, Google's actual search couldn't be much worse than it was lately. It's like they really try to get all the spam, clickbait and scams right at the top.
The AI overview sucks but it can't really be a lot worse than that :)