Hi everyone, this is Neo.

If you run an independent site selling overseas, Google search traffic is basically your lifeline. So this next piece of news might make a lot of people nervous — Google’s AI Overviews are genuinely eating into your organic search traffic.

This isn’t fear-mongering. It’s the conclusion of a rigorously designed randomized controlled experiment.

An experiment worth paying attention to

From January to February this year, researchers Saharsh Agarwal and Ananya Sen from the Indian School of Business and Carnegie Mellon University ran a large-scale field experiment. They built a Chrome extension and recruited 1,065 active U.S. users, randomly splitting them into three groups:

• Control group: browsed Google search results normally;
• AI-hidden group: the extension removed AI Overviews from search results in real time;
• AI Mode group: all searches were redirected to Google’s AI Mode.

The experiment was pre-registered on the AEA RCT Registry to ensure a rigorous design. Notably, over 95% of participants didn’t notice anything unusual during the entire experiment.

Neo’s take: What makes this experiment valuable is its randomization and stealth. Most of the data we’ve seen about AI Overviews’ impact so far is correlational — comparisons based on GSC data, for example — which makes it hard to rule out other factors. A randomized controlled experiment isolates causation much more cleanly, which makes the findings far more convincing. For independent site owners who depend on Google traffic, this kind of research deserves serious attention.

38% of your clicks just disappeared

The core finding is blunt:

• AI Overviews appeared in about 42% of search queries;
• When AI Overviews appeared, organic click-through rate dropped from 0.61 to 0.38 — a 38% decline;
• Correspondingly, zero-click searches (users who read the results page and leave without clicking anything) jumped from 54% to 72%.

In other words, nearly 4 out of every 10 potential visitors who might have clicked on your site are now lost to the AI summary.

Even more critical is the position effect: when the AI Overview appeared at the top of search results (which happened 85% of the time), the impact was strongest — removing a top-position AI Overview nearly doubled outbound clicks. When it appeared further down the page, it made almost no difference.

Neo’s take: This “position effect” is the key detail. Google’s AI Overview claims the prime spot at the top of search results more than 80% of the time, which basically puts it directly between users and your independent site. For site owners, this means that even if you’ve fought your way to position one through SEO, users can still get “intercepted” by the AI summary before they ever scroll down to the organic results. Sponsored ad clicks didn’t change much, which tells us the losses are almost entirely organic traffic — the most direct hit an SEO-dependent independent site can take.

The kicker: user experience didn’t get better

You’d assume Google launched AI Overviews to help users find answers faster. But another finding from this study might surprise a lot of people:

After the experiment, researchers surveyed participants using a 1–5 Likert scale to rate their search experience. There was almost no difference between the control group (with AI Overviews) and the AI-hidden group (without) on satisfaction, perceived information quality, or ease of finding information.

The authors put it this way: AI Overviews “divert traffic away from publishers without delivering measurable improvements to the user experience.”

Neo’s take: This is a really telling finding. Google’s official justification for AI Overviews is a better search experience, but this experiment shows that — at least at the level of users’ own perception — having the AI summary or not makes no meaningful difference. That’s a warning sign for independent site owners: your traffic is being siphoned off, and users aren’t even happier because of it. Google’s AI strategy is fundamentally about reallocating traffic within the search ecosystem, and publishers and independent sites are usually the ones left holding the short end of the stick.

AI Mode is worse

The experiment also tested Google’s AI Mode (redirecting all searches to the AI chat interface). Users in that group:

• Had even lower outbound click rates;
• Had higher zero-click search rates;
• Reported significantly lower overall satisfaction than the other two groups.

The researchers did note that this group’s results are exploratory, since attrition was higher — some users uninstalled the extension or found ways to bypass it.

Neo’s take: The AI Mode data isn’t as rigorous, but it points to a clear direction: Google is shifting search from “list-oriented” to “answer-oriented.” If that trend deepens, independent sites will find it harder and harder to earn organic traffic from Google. Rather than waiting passively, sellers should start thinking now about how to make their content and brand get cited and surfaced inside AI summaries.

What should independent site owners do?

This study is a wake-up call, but it also offers some actionable takeaways:

1. Don’t over-rely on a single traffic source. Google search is still one of the most important traffic channels for independent sites, but the erosion from AI summaries is a long-term trend. Sellers should accelerate their efforts on social media (TikTok, Pinterest), email marketing, and direct brand traffic.

2. Optimize your content’s “AI citability.” We can’t control whether an AI Overview appears, but we can structure content for it — clear headings, FAQ formats, concrete data points — to raise the odds of being cited and linked by Google’s AI.

3. Go after long-tail keywords. AI Overviews currently show up more often on informational queries; transactional and long-tail queries are less covered. Digging deep into niche long-tail keywords could be an effective way to dodge the impact in the short term.

4. Brand search is your moat. When users search your brand name directly, AI Overview interference is comparatively small. Keep investing in brand building so users remember you and come straight to you.

Neo’s take: Google’s search ecosystem is going through a deep transformation. AI Overviews are just the beginning — the search interface of the future will only get more “answer-ified.” Independent site owners need to face the reality: the era of living off traditional SEO playbooks forever is ending. Adapt, diversify your traffic, and double down on brand — that’s the only way to survive long term.

Summary

Today’s study used rigorous experimental methods to confirm what many of us already felt: Google AI Overviews are measurably cutting organic traffic to independent sites and publishers — and this traffic shift isn’t giving users a meaningfully better experience.

For those of you running independent sites overseas, this is both a challenge and a warning. Traffic windfalls don’t last forever. The key is to prepare before the change happens.