Critics accuse Google’s increasing use of AI in its search engine of taking referral traffic away from websites, but Google’s executives say the issue is a matter of quality versus quantity.
In a recent press and Q&A event, Google’s executives argued that AI is improving the quality of search results (while largely avoiding the issue of decreasing clicks).
The session included statements from several executives, such as Jenny Cheng (Vice President and General Manager of Google’s Merchant Shopping operations), Sean Downey (President of Americas & Global Partners at Google), and Nicky Rettke (YouTube Vice President of Product Management).
Does AI Reduce Traffic To Websites?
Numerous studies have found that Google’s AI overviews have significantly reduced click-through rates to both organic and paid listings, leading to significant reductions in referral traffic. The trend has brought down CTRs for nearly every type of search, but non-branded informational searchers have been most heavily impacted since the introduction of AI overviews.
Ahrefs, Advanced Web Ranking, Similarweb, and many others have independently verified that this trend is happening and seems to be getting worse as Google has increased how frequently it shows AI overviews.
What Google’s Execs Have To Say
When asked about falling click-through rates in search, Google’s executives began by saying it is partially driven by an increase in follow-up searches while using AI-enhanced search.
“What we’re seeing is people asking more questions. So they’ll ask a first question, they’ll get information, and then go and ask a different question. So they’re refining and getting more information, and then they’re making a decision of what website to go to.”
As this happens, Google seems to believe users refine exactly what they are looking for, ensuring that their clicks are more valuable.
“When they get to a decision to click out, it’s a more highly qualified click… What we hope to see over time—and we don’t have any data to share on this—is more time spent on site, which is what we see organically in a much more highly qualified visitor for the website.”
Notably, even Google admits it cannot back up these claims with data.
What About Ads?
While the Google executives did their best not to directly address falling referral traffic for organic content, they did claim that CTRs on ad placements are stable overall. Despite AI overviews pushing paid placements further down the page, Google says clicks remain largely unchanged.
“When we run ads on AI overviews versus ads on standard search, we see pretty much the same level of monetization capabilities, which would indicate most factors are the same and they’re producing really the same results for advertisers to date.”
Again, however, the company declined to share any data on the issue.
What About AI Mode?
Don’t expect anything to improve with the new wide launch of Google’s AI mode. Along with doubling down on AI features in search, this new mode, Google has made referral traffic from AI mode untrackable.
When someone clicks through to your website from within AI mode, it is currently not being recorded in Google Search Console analytics. At best, some tools seem to be capturing when clicks occur, however, they are shown with no attribution. In most cases, however, they seem not to be registering at all. This will only serve to muddy the waters while websites deal with seeing less traffic from Google.
