What happened

Google Search has an “AI Mode” tab: instead of a list of links, it writes you an answer and lets you keep asking follow-up questions. How many people stop clicking through to websites when they use it? On 18 August a research team from the University of Pennsylvania and Northeastern University published the results of an experiment on arXiv, the open research site. The paper hasn’t been reviewed by other academics yet, but its method is more rigorous than a survey or an after-the-fact estimate.

They recruited 1,100 people in the US who use Chrome and search with Google and let everyone search as usual for three days. Then they drew lots to split them into groups, each searching a set way for a week: one using Google as normal, one sent straight into AI Mode whatever they searched for, and a third with the AI features switched off. Because the groups were drawn at random, the people in them were alike, so the difference between the normal group and the AI-Mode-only group can be put down to AI Mode. Many past figures on AI taking clicks were estimated after the fact from traffic data; this study actually put two groups of people side by side.

The result is clear: the AI-Mode-only group clicked through to websites outside Google nearly 19 percentage points (18.8) less often than the group using Google as normal, and fewer of them clicked into Reddit, news sites and Wikipedia. They were also less satisfied with their searching, and more of them went off to other search engines such as Bing and DuckDuckGo.

Why it matters to you

Everyone in the study was in the US, but AI Mode has been live in Taiwan for almost a year: Google launched the Traditional Chinese version on 8 October 2025. Nobody has run a similar experiment in Taiwan, but it’s the same product working the same way, writing the answer out for the user, so our judgement is that people in Taiwan will click out less too.

For a brand, this means being mentioned by AI and getting someone onto your website are becoming two different things. Say a customer searches for the best bakery in Taichung: AI Mode lists a few, with a line or two on each, and the customer decides without opening anyone’s website. AI Mode still draws on web pages and still includes links, but once many people have read the answer, they have no reason to click. For those customers, what they know about you is whatever the AI wrote.

Reviews and news coverage go the same way. Customers who wanted to know whether you’re any good used to click into forum threads and news stories and read them for themselves; in this experiment, fewer people clicked into Reddit and news sites. In Taiwan, we expect the Dcard and PTT reviews customers read will more and more often be the AI’s condensed version: which ones it picks and how it puts them is out of your hands.

To be fair, this was a one-week experiment, and the people in it barely used AI Mode beforehand; they were moved onto it. The researchers themselves note that some of the gap may shrink once people get used to it.

What to do about it

Yes, because this loss doesn’t show up in your traffic reports. The researchers could put a number on it because they had a group that wasn’t moved onto AI Mode to compare against. A brand has nothing like that; you can’t hide AI Mode from half your customers. So when traffic drops, it’s hard to tell whether it’s the season, a competitor, or customers reading an answer in AI Mode and leaving, and it usually ends up blamed on the season or the competition.

Even customers who didn’t buy used to click in and look around, and you could read something into their clicks, the pages they viewed and how long they stayed. AI Mode takes that away too: what customers read in the answer, and what they made of it, never reaches you. What shapes their view is how the AI writes about you. Our managed GEO service looks after exactly that: the lines written about you in the answers of Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Gemini and the other major AI engines.

Book a demo, bring the question your customers most often put to AI, and we’ll run it through AI Mode on the spot so you can see how the answer writes about you.

Further reading