Being found when the AI answers: search engines in transition

The answer is already there

Anyone typing a question into Google today is often shown an AI-written text first. Google calls this an AI Overview. The ten blue links move down below it. Since October 2025, Germany, Austria and Switzerland have also had AI Mode, a separate tab in search where users ask follow-up questions as if in a chat. For companies that want to be found through their website, this changes the rules of the game: the search engine no longer merely points the way to the answer, it provides the answer. Just how badly this hits visitor numbers is disputed.

What the click studies show

In March 2025, the Pew Research Center analysed the search behaviour of 900 adults in the US, covering almost 69,000 Google searches. An AI Overview appeared in 18 per cent of searches. Where one was present, users clicked on a conventional search result in 8 per cent of cases. Without an overview, the figure was 15 per cent. Only 1 per cent clicked on a link within the overview. And 26 per cent of users ended their session entirely after a page with an AI Overview, compared with 16 per cent without one.

The SEO tool Ahrefs arrives at similar findings from a different direction. It compared 300,000 search terms, half with and half without an AI Overview, drawing on click data from the Google Search Console. In April 2025, the click-through rate on the top result was around 34 per cent lower for searches with an overview. In February 2026, Ahrefs repeated the analysis using data from December 2025: the gap had grown to 58 per cent, and positions two to ten also lost between 19 and 51 per cent.

What Google says in response

Google disagrees. In August 2025, Liz Reid, head of Google Search, wrote that the total volume of clicks from search to websites had remained largely stable year on year. Google was even sending slightly more "quality clicks" than a year earlier, meaning visits where the user does not immediately bounce back. Reports of drastic declines, she said, were based on flawed methods and isolated cases. Google did not publish any figures of its own. What it did receive was pointed criticism from the industry, and publishers such as the Wall Street Journal and the Daily Mail confirmed falling Google traffic.

Both sides can be right. Google counts clicks in total, the studies count clicks per search. If people ask more and longer questions, the overall figure can stay stable while each individual site receives less. Google itself says traffic is shifting: forums, videos, podcasts and sites with first-hand experience and in-depth content are gaining, others are losing. In February 2026, Google also changed how links are displayed in AI Overviews and AI Mode, with preview images and text excerpts. Tests had shown more interaction, according to Google. The company gave no click figures.

Who gets cited and who does not

The AI Overview names its sources. So it is visible who appears there. In the Pew study, Wikipedia, YouTube and Reddit were the three most frequently named sites, together accounting for 15 per cent of all sources. Government sites appeared in 6 per cent of overviews, compared with just 2 per cent in the conventional results. That fits with Google's pointer towards forums and first-hand accounts: the AI favours sites that have something of their own to say, and sites regarded as reliable. Anyone publishing the tenth version of a how-to guide is competing with the AI, which writes exactly those texts itself.

Google describes how the selection works in its documentation for website operators. For a given question, the AI runs several sub-searches on sub-topics and assembles its answer from them. There are no additional requirements for appearing in AI Overviews and AI Mode, it says; the usual rules for search apply. The recommendations are helpful, original content, texts with images and videos, and structured data that reflects the visible text. There is no separate breakdown in the Search Console; AI clicks are included under "Web".

AI Mode and chatbots

AI Mode goes a step further than the overview. Google reports that early users submitted queries two to three times longer there than in classic search and visited a broader range of websites. Reliable figures on click behaviour in AI Mode are not yet available.

Alongside this, AI chatbots are growing as a route to the web in their own right. According to data from the analytics provider Similarweb, the category reached 9.5 billion visits a month worldwide in May 2026, 70 per cent more than a year earlier. ChatGPT still held 53 per cent of that, down from 76 per cent in June 2025, while Google's Gemini had grown to a good quarter. Similarweb measures how often ChatGPT cites websites as sources in the US at 6.8 per cent of answers, up from 1.6 per cent in June 2025. For service professions, the rate was below 4 per cent. Chatbots therefore point to websites more often than before, but still rarely.

What this means for companies

For a company with its own website, three sober observations follow. First: visitors from search are declining for informational questions, regardless of whether Google or the studies have the better arithmetic. A look at your own visitor numbers shows which pages have lost ground since 2025 and which queries lie behind them. Second: the AI's sources are visible, and Google describes what gets cited: first-hand experience, expertise at first hand, clear structure. That is the same recommendation as for years, only with harsher consequences for interchangeable texts. Third: a click is no longer the only yardstick. A company named as a source in an AI Overview is visible, even if nobody clicks. What that mention is worth depends on whether the website is meant to deliver recognition, trust or enquiries.

German courts have since ruled that Google is also legally answerable for the content of its AI Overviews. What counts for visibility is that the search engine is changing its role: from signpost to information provider that names its sources.