AI RESEARCH
Impact of AI Search Summaries on Website Traffic: Evidence from Google AI Overviews and Wikipedia
arXiv CS.AI
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ArXi:2602.18455v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Search engines increasingly display LLM-generated answers shown above organic links, shifting search from link lists to answer-first summaries. Publishers contend these summaries substitute for source pages and cannibalize traffic, while platforms argue they are complementary by directing users through included links. We estimate the causal impact of Google's AI Overview (AIO) on Wikipedia traffic by leveraging the feature's staggered geographic rollout and Wikipedia's multilingual structure.