Pew Tracked 68,879 Searches. AI Overviews Ate Half the Clicks. The Other Half Barely Survived.
A Pew Research study from July 2025 observed 68,879 real user searches and found something rather inconvenient for anyone still obsessing over blue links. When Google's AI Overview appeared on a results page, users clicked a traditional organic result only 8% of the time. When no AI Overview was present, that click rate climbed to 15%. Nearly halved, for those of you struggling with the arithmetic.
This is what we call attention displacement, a concept so simple I hesitate to spell it out. When an AI-generated summary satisfies the user's query directly on the results page, the incentive to click through to any underlying source collapses. The mental model is straightforward: optimize for being cited inside the AI answer, not for ranking below it. You are no longer competing for a click. You are competing for a mention.
Pew Research conducted the study. The brands adapting to this shift are those pivoting from traditional SEO toward what practitioners are calling AI Answer Engine Optimization, though I suspect most are simply panicking and calling it strategy.
- Open Google and search a question related to your business or topic. If an AI Overview appears at the top, note which brands or sources it cites. This tells you who currently wins the mention game.
- Search the same question in ChatGPT or another AI assistant. Note which sources it references in its response. These are your real competitors now, not whoever ranks position three on page one.
- Compare the cited sources across both Google's AI Overview and ChatGPT's answer. Identify what those sources have in common structurally. Clear factual formatting. Authoritative domain. Concise definitive answers. Adjust one piece of your own content to match that pattern.