Press Gazette, the UK journalism trade magazine, has published an alarming study of how publications may be affected by Google’s AI Overviews feature that was rolled out to US users in May (though subsequently rolled back).

The study observed 3,300 search queries that the authors deemed were important for publishers based on traffic data from five publications. It measured how often AI Overviews were offered for those terms, and what the impact was to the prominence of sources — i.e. how far were the sources of information pushed down the results page.

Here’s a chart of one key finding:

The big unknown here, as the authors note, is precisely how broad Google’s use of AI Overviews will be. In this study, the summaries appeared on just over 23% of queries.

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