As a follow-up to yesterday’s item on how Google’s AI overviews are curtailing traffic to websites by as much as 25%, here is a link to Nielsen Norman Group’s just-published study showing that generative AI is reshaping search.
While AI offers compelling shortcuts around tedious research tasks, it isn’t close to completely replacing traditional search. But, even when people are using traditional search, the AI-generated overview that now tops almost all search-results pages steals a significant amount of attention and often shortcuts the need to visit the actual pages.
They write that users have developed a way to search over the years, skipping sponsored results and heading straight for the organic links. Users also haven’t completely broken free of traditional Google Search, now adding chatbots to the mix:
While generative AI does offer enough value to change user behaviors, it has not replaced traditional search entirely. Traditional search and AI chats were often used in tandem to explore the same topic and were sometimes used to fact-check each other.
All our participants engaged in traditional search (using keywords, evaluating results pages, visiting content pages, etc.) multiple times in the study. Nobody relied entirely on genAI’s responses (in chat or in an AI overview) for all their information-seeking needs.
In many ways, I think this is smart. Unless “web search” is happening, I tend double-check ChatGPT and Claude, especially for anything historical and mission-critical. I also like Perplexity for that fact—because it shows me its receipts by giving me sources.
