The Impact of Artificial Intelligence in Google Search on Click Quality

Google Announcement: Google announced that integrating Artificial Intelligence into Search contributes to an increase in the number of queries and an improvement in click quality. Liz Reid, Head of Search at Google, stated that the volume of organic clicks from search to websites has remained relatively stable year-over-year, with a noticeable increase in click quality, meaning that visitors arriving at websites are more engaged and less likely to bounce quickly.

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AI Overviews: Google attributes this development to "AI Overviews," a feature that encourages users to conduct longer and more complex searches. This behavior leads to the appearance of more links on the results page, increasing opportunities for websites to appear and gain clicks. Reid also pointed to a shift in the nature of popular content, where content offering "authentic voices and direct perspectives," such as forums, videos, and podcasts, thrives.

User Behavior: While "AI Overviews" may satisfy users' desire for quick answers to simple questions, such as knowing when the moon will be full, Google confirms that users still tend to click on links to explore topics in greater depth or to make purchases, which confirms that clicks resulting from these interactions are of higher value to publishers.

Pew Research Center Report

Conflicting Results: This contrasts with a report published by the Pew Research Center on September 10, 2024, which found that visitors who viewed an AI summary clicked on traditional search results only 8% of total visits, compared to 15% for those who did not view a summary. The Pew study also revealed that only 1% of searches that included AI summaries resulted in users clicking on the source links within those summaries.

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Cloudflare CEO's Comment

Decline in Traffic Referrals: For his part, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince commented in a post on platform X on the significant decline in traffic referrals from search, noting that Google now sends one visitor for every 18 pages crawled, a sharp decrease compared to one visitor for every two pages a decade ago.