Growth Intelligence Brief #5
No one clicks on AI sources, Queries are getting longer, the browser wars return, who won/lost H1 in SEO? and an update on my annual predictions
Welcome to another Growth Intelligence Brief, where organic growth leaders discover what matters—getting insights into the bigger picture and guidance on how to stay ahead of the competition.
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Today’s Growth Intelligence Brief went out to 400 marketing leaders (+19 since the last issue).
This week, we’re tracking 3 seismic shifts in search and interface control:
AI Overviews are eating the SERP and giving back almost nothing in return. Pew Research Center’s latest study confirms what SEOs feared: users barely click when AIOs show up.
Ad click behavior is changing fast: Google Ads data reveals a sharp drop in CTR for short queries and a rise in “prompt-style” searches.
Browser wars are back. OpenAI and Perplexity just launched their own browsers to challenge Chrome’s grip, and the timing is no accident.
H1 2025 Search landscape review. Who wins? Who loses?
Prediction tracker update. How did my predictions for this year hold up?
Only 1% of users click on AIO citations
Here’s what happened:
The Pew Research Center released a report last week examining search behavior of 900 participants. Here’s what they found:
Google users who encounter an AI summary are less likely to click on links to other websites than users who do not see one. Users who encountered an AI summary clicked on a traditional search result link in 8% of all visits. Those who did not encounter an AI summary clicked on a search result nearly twice as often (15% of visits). [1]
In March 2025, AI Overviews appeared in about one in five queries. But here’s the kicker: The Pew report found that users almost never clicked the links inside them.
18% of all the Google searches in the study generated an AIO as part of the search results.
The vast majority of the AIO summaries (88%) cited three or more sources. Only 1% cited a single source.
The Pew study also found that longer searchers were more likely to produce an AI summary at the time, with:
8% of one- or two-word searches resulted in an AIO
For searches of 10 words or more, 53% showed an AIO
Why this news matters:
This Pew Research study confirms what many SEOs and publishers have suspected: AI Overviews don’t just summarize the web - they take attention from those who help create the content for it.
Only 1% of users who saw an AI summary clicked a link inside it.
And it’s not just happening on search. Google is now testing AI summaries in Discover, too - one of the few remaining sources of algorithmic referral traffic. [2]
Combine that with ongoing publisher licensing tests and you start to see the broader strategy: Keep users inside the Google ecosystem longer and hand-pick publisher partnerships on Google’s terms. [3]
Google’s official response? Pretty predictable, calling the study “flawed” and pointing to aggregate click volumes:
“People are gravitating to AI-powered experiences, and AI features in Search enable people to ask even more questions, creating new opportunities for people to connect with websites. This study uses a flawed methodology and skewed queryset that is not representative of Search traffic. We consistently direct billions of clicks to websites daily and have not observed significant drops in aggregate web traffic as is being suggested.” [4]
But this isn't about aggregate clicks; it’s about who gets them.
My take on this:
I get why and how Google usually publishes PR responses, but this one is off.
First, the Pew study didn't just analyze ~70K keywords but also the behavior of 900 users, which has a much higher signal. Second, “aggregate web traffic” can mean a variety of things. Are we including brand queries? Paid search? Clicks that go to other Google properties?
I think we’re seeing Google run out of creative ways to explain that referral traffic is tanking.
Here’s what to do:
The study shows that clicks on citations are basically meaningless at this point. They don't compensate for traffic loss from classic results.
So we have to either (1) stop investing in Search and carefully weigh the alternatives, or (2) change the way we evaluate success:
-> Change KPIs: Shift from clicks to visibility + revenue impact
-> Expect more declines: Forecasting traffic growth is career suicide. Project the Google traffic decline linearly over the next 12-24 months, but also do this for revenue from organic visitors, which is hopefully flat to up. Build your narrative around staying above that projection.
-> Invest in other traffic / engagement platforms: Reddit, Youtube, Linkedin, Etc. Organic Growth in 2025 and beyond is a multiplatform endeavor that requires new skill sets, team capabilities, and metrics. You might not compensate for traffic loss, but this will certainly help you compensate for influence loss.
-> Test into AI Search optimization: Keep expectations grounded, but acknowledge there could be a real opportunity in being as visible (and positively “sentimented”) on ChatGPT & Co. as possible. The big question is how much we can influence it. The verdict is not out yet, but I predict we will have clear answers over the next 12-24 months.