A new Google AI Overview study says that about half of the links displayed in the AI Overviews overlap with the links shown in the traditional Google Search results. Plus, the most linked to sources are YouTube and Wikipedia, according to the new report.
The study was done by Rich Sanger and Laurence O’Toole of Authoritas. It looked at 11,163 queries that generated 2,358 AI Overviews (21%) and those 2,358 AI Overviews had on average 8.9 links each.
The study said, “46.3% of the documents linked in the summaries were from the top organic search results for the exact match query.” It also says, that the “most frequently linked URLs included YouTube (3.88% from youtube.com and 2.59% from m.youtube.com), Wikipedia (3.76%), and less frequently, Southern Living (1.53%).”
The studies we’ve seen before show different results. Maybe because AI Overviews are changing a lot, maybe because of the types of queries used in each study or maybe because of how the studies were done.
Rich wrote, “The overlap between AI Overview links and search results for direct match queries was 46.3%, higher than the findings from earlier studies by Authoritas and Advanced Web Ranking but lower than SE Ranking’s latest research.”
In any event, you can read the new study over here.