Google users who encounter an AI Overview are about half as likely as other users to click on search results
In a March 2025 analysis, Google users who encountered an AI summary were less likely to click on links to other websites than users who did not see one.
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The reason? Google hasn't had as long to enshittify their AI as they have their search results.
Real "Unpopular Opinion" hours, but a lot of the Google AI results are honestly helpful and significantly less annoying to navigate than the links they reference.
No annoying or intrusive ads or DONATE PLEASE pop-ups or demands that I give them permission to add cookies. No miles of irrelevant fluff text. No captchas or other weird security features.
This feels like a patch on a patch on a patch, given that so much of these annoyances are a consequence of aggressive AI data harvesting and Google Adsense incentives and decades of privatization championed by Silicon Valley libertarians.
But here we are, regardless. AI answers filter a lot of that crap out
I largely agree with you. The web was already long enshittified with SEO and the browsers themselves loosening their own rules that would trim down results. Any search that's moderately complicated often get results that are barely relevant and/or trying to sell you something. The AI summary IMO does help.
But here we are, regardless. AI answers filter a lot of that crap out
they do not
I find that most AI answers are full of errors and are really only useful for topics I know nothing about - those answers are always on point.
Excuse me while I go scrape the spackle off my driveway (did you know it was a great substitute for sidewalk deicer?).
You can't even get good results by adding reddit to the search anymore.
Now that I think of it... Didn't reddit add some ai search engine thing to their site?
Reddit took money from Google in exchange for Google to have exclusive rights to trawl reddit with their AI scraping bots. In theory that should mean you get better answers by adding reddit. In actuality though what happens is Google have deliberately made their search engine worse in order to get you to view more ads by staying on the search page longer.
They shit in the search results precisely so we’ll use the ai instead
I used to always magically find what I was looking for. Now I don’t and sometimes only the ai results include the relevant webpages I was searching for
AI search will win because they already are making it so
Nah. They definitely are using that now that their AI is competing in the market. But the enshittification started before Generative AI.
The main intention (from Google's on leaked documents) was to keep people on the page longer so they could view ads longer and potentially click through those ads.
That was Google's business model for years before AI.
I certainly believe that too but I could still always find what I needed immediately until the AI helper started appearing
