Google AI Overviews - fuck you, pay me

For two weeks in January 2026, a browser extension removed AI Overviews from the Google search results of 374 people. The remaining links moved silently up to fill the gap, so the interface looked just as the search always had. At the end of the two weeks, researchers asked participants how they felt about their search experience: satisfaction, quality, and ease of finding information. On every measure, the numbers matched the group that kept their overviews. Nobody missed them. The only difference was that people without overviews left Google for other sites 67% more often.

This field experiment by Saharsh Agarwal of the Indian School of Business and Ananya Sen of Carnegie Mellon, published on SSRN in April and revised in June 2026, produced the first causal measure of what Google's AI Overviews are costing the rest of the web. The answer is 40% of outbound organic clicks on queries where overviews appear, with no measurable benefit for the people doing the searching. On 20 May, at Google I/O, the company made AI Mode, that demonstrably made no improvement to the user experience, the default search experience worldwide.

What the experiment measured

The study recruited 1,065 US desktop Chrome users through Prolific and randomly assigned them to one of three groups. A control group saw Google as normal. A treatment group had AI Overviews removed in real time by the extension whenever they would otherwise have appeared, with organic results shifting up to fill the gap so cleanly that over 95% of participants reported noticing nothing. A third group was redirected into Google's AI Mode for all queries.

The experiment design settles a methodological argument that has run since the first observational studies appeared. Ahrefs, Pew Research, and Similarweb all pointed at the same traffic decline, but none could prove that the overviews caused it rather than some other change in search behaviour or Google's algorithm. Agarwal and Sen's extension created the counterfac…