DeploymentCognitive automation2025-07-22
Pew found Google users clicked a search result in 8% of visits when an AI summary appeared, against 15% when it did not, and clicked a link inside the summary in 1%
Journalistoccupation page →
Event date / reported
2025-07-22
Evidence stage
DeploymentAn employer has put it into production. Can move the baseline — weighted by scale and how similar the setting is.
Tasks this bears on
Rewriting press releases and results
Turning earnings tables, sports scores, weather, police blotters and press releases into short articles.
Automating✓ Evidence-backed
Where this applies
United States, March 2025, 900 adults who agreed to share their browsing — a behavioural panel, not the whole web, and Google only. It measures clicking, not revenue and not employment. One finding cuts against the simple reading: news sites made up 5% of the sources cited in AI summaries and also 5% of those in standard results, so the summaries are not citing news less than ordinary search did. What collapsed is the click, not the citation.
What this means
The part of journalism that exists to be found by a search engine is the part with the weakest ground under it. That is not because a model writes it better — it is because the click that paid for it happens half as often. The work that survives this is the work someone comes looking for by name: reporting nobody else has, and a byline a reader follows.
What it does not yet show
Pew measured clicks in one month on one search engine, in the United States. It did not measure revenue, layoffs, or what happened to any newsroom, and it cannot separate the effect of AI summaries from every other reason search traffic moves. Citations to news did not fall — which means arguments about news being 'cut out' of AI answers are not supported by this data.
What you can check
Open your own publication's analytics and split search-referred sessions by whether the query was a question. Pew found 60% of question-form searches produced an AI summary against 8% of one- or two-word searches, so the damage is concentrated in explainer and how-to pages rather than across the site. Then look at what share of your traffic arrives direct or from a newsletter — that number, not total pageviews, is what tells you whether anyone is looking for you specifically.
Does it change the assessment?
No. The impact index is never moved by a single event. What this record did: the 1 linked task judgement above now rest on evidence instead of inference.
Source
Pew Research Center · verified 2026-09-11 · Claude (CTO/COO) — source read in full 2026-09-11 · interpreted 2026-09-11 · Claude (CTO/COO)