Google AI Search Soon Becoming Default Choice As Fewer Users Are Clicking Through to Websites

AI-generated search results are quickly becoming the norm, whether users are actively choosing them or not. According to a new report, Google’s AI Overviews, the AI-generated answers that appear directly in search results, have jumped from showing up in 15 percent of searches to 43 percent in just a year.

Market intelligence firm Similarweb, in a recent analysis of the generative search landscape, noted that what started as an AI layer sitting on top of traditional search results has effectively become the search experience itself. Users are increasingly funnelled into AI Overviews first, from where they can continue exploring through Google’s more conversational AI Mode.

That shift shows up clearly in usage numbers too. AI Mode visits climbed

from 126 million in June 2025 to 279 million by May 2026, more than doubling within a year.

Google is keeping all the traffic to itself

Together, this data points to a genuine shift in how people use the web. Where Google once functioned mainly as a list of links pointing elsewhere, it’s increasingly becoming the place where people get their answer directly, pulling information from indexed websites without necessarily sending users to those sites at all.

This appears to be keeping people on Google’s own platform longer. Similarweb’s data shows the average length of Google search queries has grown over the past year, suggesting people are moving away from short, keyword-based searches in favour of longer, more natural questions built for AI to answer conversationally.

This shift hasn’t been good news for publishers. As AI-generated answers cite sources without always sending users to click through, referral traffic has taken a hit, a trend Similarweb first flagged last year, noting it was particularly damaging for news publishers specifically.

Some pushback has emerged. Cloudflare recently introduced tools letting publishers block AI crawlers from accessing their content entirely, unless AI companies agree to pay for that access through Cloudflare’s own marketplace.

Interestingly, even as click-throughs remain limited, the number of AI responses that include a source citation at all has grown more than fivefold over the past year, according to Similarweb’s report. Still, actual citation rates remain fairly low in absolute terms, just 6.8 percent of ChatGPT desktop queries in the US included citations as of May 2026, though this varies by category, with travel, retail, and sports queries seeing citations more often than others.

Should Website Owners Give Up?

There’s at least one encouraging data point. Following a May 7 search update, ChatGPT’s US desktop referral traffic improved meaningfully, with the share of visits actually landing on a webpage more than doubling, from 25 percent in March 2026 to nearly 60 percent by May 30, 2026. This suggests that when prominent links are actually available within AI-generated results, users are willing to click through to them.

That improvement, however, doesn’t change the broader direction of travel. Google is steadily shifting from being a gateway to the rest of the internet into a destination people rarely need to leave at all.