Readers told the Guardian this week that Google barely resembles the search engine they grew up with. One called it "enshittified" and said they missed the old version outright. For another, the AI summary now sitting above the results does more work than the ten blue links it replaced.
Both readers are describing the same change. They just disagree about whether it's good news.
Google's AI Overviews now sit above the traditional list for a large share of searches, and that one design choice is why an SEO strategy for AI search has to work differently than one built for a page nobody skips past.
What Readers Are Actually Doing Differently
The Guardian's own framing captures the scale of it: the change to what was once the gateway to the rest of the internet has been profound, and the browsing habits of billions of people are shifting.
Some of the readers the paper heard from now go straight to DuckDuckGo, or block the AI summary with a browser extension. Others say the analysis on top of the page beats a ranked list they'd still have to click through anyway.
That split matters more than either side winning it. Some searchers still want a page and a source. The ones who don't are the searches least likely to send anyone a click at all.
The Numbers Nobody Can Argue With
Pew Research Center tracked the browsing of 900 US adults across 68,879 Google searches and found people clicked a traditional result in just 8% of searches where an AI summary appeared, against 15% where it didn't. Only 1% clicked a link inside the summary itself.
| What Pew measured | With an AI summary | Without one |
|---|---|---|
| Clicked a traditional result | 8% | 15% |
| Clicked a link inside the summary | 1% | n/a |
| Ended the session on that page | 26% | 16% |
Zoom out and the same pattern shows up in publisher traffic. As Search Engine Journal reported, a Reuters Institute analysis of Chartbeat data across more than 2,500 sites found Google search traffic down by roughly a third globally between November 2024 and November 2025.
Why Google's "Bounce Clicks" Explanation Falls Short
Google's head of Search, Liz Reid, has an answer for this. On Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast in April, she said people who quickly click and return to search no longer need to visit the page because they already got the fact from the Overview.
People wanting to read longer, she said, still click through.
It's a reasonable theory. But as Search Engine Journal noted, Reid has repeated it across three public appearances without ever showing a chart, a percentage or a year-over-year number to support it. A business relying on organic search can't plan around an explanation nobody can check.
Building an SEO Strategy for AI Search
Organic search still matters. But the content that earns a citation inside an AI summary has to work harder than content built to rank tenth on a results page.
- Structured data and schema markup, so Google can lift a precise answer instead of guessing at one from body text.
- Pages that answer one specific question clearly near the top, rather than burying the answer under a long introduction.
- Original data, pricing or examples an AI summary can't paraphrase from three other sites saying the same thing.
We've broken down what schema markup actually does for a fintech site's search visibility, and looked at how home service businesses show up inside generative search results. The logic carries over whatever you sell.
The shift readers described to the Guardian is looking permanent, not temporary. A marketing strategy still built for the old results page will miss the traffic that has already moved past it.
Sources
- 'I miss old Google': readers tell us how they search the internet in the age of AI — The Guardian
- Do people click on links in Google AI summaries? — Pew Research Center
