Pew tracked 68,879 Google searches last year. On the searches where Google dropped an AI summary at the top, only 8 out of 100 people clicked through to an actual website. Without the summary it was 15. So on those searches, more than half the clicks just stopped happening. And here is the part that I keep coming back to: the businesses losing those clicks did nothing wrong. They still rank where they always did. The page above them simply started answering the question, so the visitor never has a reason to scroll down to them.

You spend years earning a ranking. Then the result around your ranking changes, your position does not, and your traffic quietly walks off somewhere you cannot see. Your page is being read out to the person before they ever land on it.

I went and checked whether this was only a Google problem. It is not. Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini anything and you get the same shape of answer: a paragraph first, and a link somewhere underneath if you are lucky. Pew found people clicked the link inside the AI summary about 1% of the time. One percent. For almost everyone, the summary is where the search ends. The source barely gets seen.

Questions worth sitting with

If search sends you customers, these are the ones I would not skip before the next marketing review.

How much of your pipeline actually starts with someone clicking an organic search result? Most owners I ask do not have the number, and not having it is the first problem.
Which of your pages answer a question so completely that an AI summary can now answer it for the reader? Those are the exposed ones.
When someone asks an AI about your category, does your name show up in the answer, or are you only in the blue links underneath? Getting named in the answer is a different job than ranking.
If your search clicks halved again next year, what is the second way people would find you?

What I actually did about it

I am not telling anyone to give up on their website. We just rebuilt ours. But I built it for the job it has now, which is to be readable and quotable by the machines doing the summarizing, so that when one of them answers a question in our space it has a real shot at citing us. In practice that meant pages a crawler can read without running any code, structured data that spells out what each page is, answers written so they can be lifted cleanly, and a plain text file that points AI crawlers at the things worth reading. None of it is glamorous. It is just the version of the work that matters now.

If you want to know how exposed your own site is to this, that is the first thing we look at in an AI Audit.

Source: Pew Research Center, 68,879 Google searches tracked, 2025.