Google says artificial intelligence made people search more, not less. The independent research on where those searches lead deserves equal attention — especially from business owners who depend on the open web for customers.

Nick Fox, Google's senior vice president of knowledge and information, addressed the two biggest fears about AI search head-on in a LinkedIn post this week. The first fear was that AI chatbots would make searching obsolete. The second was that AI-generated answers would end click-throughs to websites.

On the first point, Fox writes that the opposite occurred, “When people can ask whatever questions are on their minds, they use Google Search more than ever.” On the second, he says Google continues to send billions of clicks to the web every day through Search overall, and billions of clicks every week through AI features in Search alone.

The claims arrive as Google completes its largest redesign of the product in years. At Google I/O 2026, the company unveiled a reimagined search box , powered by its Gemini 3.5 Flash model, that merges AI Overviews and AI Mode into a single flow. As The Verge reported , the box now expands for longer questions, accepts attached documents and photos, and will soon support background AI agents, an expanded booking feature and a generative UI capability that builds small apps directly inside results. Traditional link-only results remain available under a separate “Web” tab.

What Independent Research Shows

Fox's numbers are consistent with a real phenomenon: query volume can grow while the economics of individual clicks change. Both trends are documented, and both matter.

A Pew Research Center analysis of browsing data from 900 U.S. adults found that users clicked a traditional search result on 8% of visits when an AI summary appeared, compared with 15% when it did not. Links cited inside the summaries themselves were clicked on just 1% of visits. Pew also found that browsing sessions ended entirely on 26% of pages with an AI summary, versus 16% without one.

More recent work points the same direction with stronger methodology. A randomized field experiment by researchers at the Indian School of Business and Carnegie Mellon University, covering more than 1,000 U.S. participants, found that AI Overviews reduced organic clicks to external websites by 38% on queries where they appeared — while users' self-reported satisfaction barely changed when the summaries were removed.

Google has publicly disputed the methodology of some of these studies. And to be fair to the company’s framing, the two data sets measure different things. “Billions of clicks per week” is an absolute figure across an enormous query base; the independent studies measure click rates on individual result pages.

Both can be accurate at the same time. Total clicks can remain vast while the share of searches that produce a visit to any given website declines.

What This Means For Businesses That Depend On Search

For a small or midsize business, the absolute number matters less than the rate. Your bakery, law practice or SaaS product receives a slice of the click-through rate on the specific queries where you appear — and that rate, per the independent research, drops sharply when an AI summary sits above you.

The I/O roadmap extends the pattern. When search can answer the question, book the appointment, call the service provider and build the comparison widget inside the results page, the click-through becomes one option among several rather than the default outcome. That is a design implication, not a hidden agenda — Google has been open about building a more complete experience inside Search.

Three practical responses follow from the data.

Optimize for citation, not only for ranking. Pew found that the most frequently cited sources in AI summaries are Wikipedia, YouTube and Reddit. Structured, specific, verifiable content — clear answers, named data, original expertise — is likelier to be pulled into the AI layer. Presence inside the answer is becoming a distribution channel of its own, even at low click rates.

Build owned channels alongside rented ones. Email lists, communities and direct-navigation brand searches are the traffic sources no interface redesign can intermediate. Businesses that treat search as their only acquisition channel are exposed to a single company's product decisions in a way they were not five years ago.

Measure visits, not impressions. Appearing in an AI Overview is visibility without a session. Analytics that focus on actual arrivals — and on repeat visitors — will give a truer picture of search's contribution than impression counts, which can rise even as visits fall.

Fox closes his post by noting that Google is continuously iterating to make it easier to connect with the sites people love. The independent data suggests business owners should iterate too — toward strategies that work whether or not the click arrives.