More questions than clicks from Google’s AI answers
New research from Similarweb shows that Google’s AI-generated search summaries now surface in 43 percent of queries, nearly tripling their footprint from 15 percent just twelve months earlier. The firm’s analysis tracks how deeply AI Overviews have woven themselves into the daily search experience for millions of users.
Monthly visits to Google’s AI Mode, the more conversational interface, climbed from 126 million in June 2025 to 279 million by May 2026. The report identifies a behavioral shift: searchers are typing longer, more natural phrases instead of the short keyword strings that defined search for two decades. Google is increasingly becoming the destination rather than a gateway.
For publishers already squeezed by declining referral traffic, the trend deepens an existing wound. AI Overviews pull key information directly into Google’s results page, reducing the incentive to click through. Cloudflare stepped in with a marketplace approach that lets publishers charge AI companies for crawling access or block them entirely.
ChatGPT shows publishers a flicker of hope
ChatGPT’s desktop referral patterns offer a modest counterpoint. A May 7 update pushed the proportion of ChatGPT visits that land on external webpages from 25 percent in March to nearly 60 percent by late May. The share of AI responses containing citations has also grown fivefold year over year.
Despite that progress, citation rates remain low: just 6.8 percent of US ChatGPT desktop queries carried a source link as of May. The trajectory across both Google and ChatGPT points to an internet where AI platforms hold users within their own interfaces, and the mechanics of getting discovered by search traffic have shifted in ways that publishers are still learning to navigate.
