Your clicks have immense power. Collectively, just moments of our attention can lift or sink a site. But if you're like most people, it seems there's been a change in your behaviour – one that could reshape the internet you know and love.

Over the last year, Google made a tweak. I'm sure you've noticed by now. The first thing you see in search results is often an AI-generated response, instead of the list of blue links that topped Google for decades. Google calls these chatbot answers "AI Overviews". Sometimes they're incredibly useful. Other times they literally tell people to eat rocks and glue in a moment of hallucination. Apparently, AI Overviews also influence what you do next.

This year, 900 web-surfing Americans gave the Pew Research Center permission to spy on their browsing. "These users were less likely to click a link when they did a search that produced an AI summary – and also more likely to end their browsing session entirely," says Aaron Smith, director of Data Labs at Pew. According to a new analysis, Google searchers were almost two times less likely to click on links to other sites when they saw AI Overviews. And 26% of the time, they just closed their browser.

This is what you might call a "very big deal". People use Google Search five trillion times a year. It's where the majority of all online activity begins.

A huge portion of websites make their money through advertising, particularly sites that provide information and content rather than sell things. It's an ecosystem that lives and dies on the size of the audience, and the whims of Google's algorithm can basically shut your company down overnight.

"Most websites require that Google traffic to keep the lights on," says Lily Ray, vice president of search engine optimisation strategy and research at the marketing agency Amsive. "But AI Overviews are cutting into traffic so dramatically that many sites are seeing 20%, 30%, even 40% declines in their revenue. It's having a devastating impact, and removing the incentive for a lot of people to create high-quality content."

This could be a preview of things to come, because Google just launched a feature called AI Mode that gets rid of traditional search results entirely. Ray and a long list of experts say the outcome will be cataclysmic. Some fear it may

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