AI summaries are appearing less and less frequently in Google searches, with a new report finding that they appear in fewer than 10% of search queries.
It’s been just over two months since Google launched AI Overviews to all search users in the U.S., and the impact has been tough for the company. While many feared that AI Overviews would pull large swaths of the internet away from individual websites, it appears that the massive, viral errors caused by AI Overviews have led Google to decide to significantly scale back the project.
According to data released in early June, Google showed AI summaries in more than 80% of preview testers’ searches, but that dropped to about 40-50% when the feature was first widely rolled out in May, and then to just 15% a few weeks after the glue-on-pizza blunders went viral.
Now, the latest figures reveal that Google may be throttling even further.
Search Engine Land In the report, we again look at data. Bright EdgeAs of late June, Google found that it was showing AI summaries for only about 7% of searches, down from 11% earlier this month.
Breaking it down further, the report finds that AI Overview has fallen by half in searches for education-related questions (down from 26% to 13%), appears in just 9% of e-commerce queries (down from 26%), and “almost 0%” of entertainment-related questions (down from 14%).Following a viral mistake that largely originated from Reddit, AI Overview also appears to be referencing Reddit much less frequently in its answers.
Anecdotally, we’ve also noticed that AI summaries are now rarely showing up. They only pop up occasionally, and in places where they used to show up. Previously, we’ve noticed that AI summaries most often show up in queries that are phrased as direct questions. But now, even for simple questions like “Is the Pixel Watch waterproof?”, Google is showing featured snippets and links instead of AI-generated answers.
What about you? Have you looked at AI Overview lately? Vote in the poll below and let us know in the comments whether you prefer search with AI Overview or without it.
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