AI Search Is Cutting Clicks: 93% of Google AI Mode Sessions End Without a Site Visit

With AI, search is moving from a 'list of links' toward a 'direct answer'. New data shows the impact of this shift on traffic to websites is bigger than expected.

What the research found

• A preregistered field experiment with 1,100 participants by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and Northeastern University found that AI Overviews and AI Mode reduce referrals to websites without improving the user experience.
• 93% of AI Mode sessions end without a single click to an external site.
• Google search traffic to news publishers fell 40.2% year over year.
• An Ahrefs study found AI Overviews correlate with a 58% drop in click-through rate for top-ranking pages.
• Some participants who were made to use AI Mode turned to alternatives such as DuckDuckGo, Bing and Yahoo.

What it means for companies

A site's visibility can no longer be measured only by 'what position am I in?' When users get the answer on the search page or in an AI assistant, what matters is being cited as the source of that answer. This is called Generative Engine Optimization (GEO).

How to become a source in AI answers

• Answer the question clearly and briefly at the top of the page; give the detail afterwards.
• Use structured data (schema.org) and machine-readable files such as llms.txt.
• Give numbers, dates and sources; AI engines prefer to quote verifiable information.
• Let AI search bots crawl your site and announce new content quickly (e.g. IndexNow).

The remot angle

The same principle applies to internal AI assistants: when employees get an answer from an assistant, being able to see which document it is based on determines trust. remot lets internal assistants show their sources and keeps a record of which document contributed to which answer, so answers stay verifiable.