I’ve been extremely antsy to publish this study. Consider it the AIO Usability study 1.5, with new insights. You also want to stay tuned for our first AI Mode usability study! It’s coming in a few weeks (make sure to subscribe not to miss it).
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Since March, everyone’s been asking the same question: “Are AI Overviews killing our conversions?”
Our 2025 usability study gives a clearer answer than the hot takes you’ll see on LinkedIn and X (Twitter).
In May 2025, I published significant findings from the first comprehensive UX study of AI Overviews (AIOs). Today, I’m presenting you with new insights from that study based on a cutting-edge RAG system that analyzed over 100,000 words of transcription.
The most significant, stand-out finding from that study: People use AI Overviews to get oriented and save time.
Then, for any search that involves a transaction or high-stakes decision-making, searchers validate outside Google, usually with trusted brands or authority domains.
Net-net: AIO is a preview layer. Blue links still close. Before we dive in, you need to hear these insights from Garrett French, CEO of Xofu, who financed this study:
“What lit me up most from this latest work from Kevin: We have direct insight now into an “anchor pattern” of AIO behavior.
In this usability study, we discovered that users rarely voice distrust of AI Overviews directly – instead they hesitate, refine, or click out.
Therefore, hesitation itself is the loudest signal to us.
We see the same in complex, transition-enabling purchase-committee buying (B2B and B2C): Procurement stalls without lifecycle clarity, engineer stall without specs, IT stalls without validation.
These aren’t complaints. They’re unresolved, unanswered, and even unknown questions that have NEVER shown themselves in KW demand.
As content marketers, we have never held ourselves systematically accountable to answering them.
Customer service logs – as an example of one surface for discovering friction – expose the same hesitations in traceable form through repeated chats, escalations, deployment blocks, etc.
Customer service logs are one surface; AIOs are another.
But the real source of truth is always contextual audience friction.
Answering these “friction-inducing, unasked latent questions give us a way to read those signals and design content that truly moves decisions forward.
What The Study Actually Found:
- Organic results are the most trusted and most consistently successful destination across tasks.
- Sponsored results are noticed but actively skipped due to low trust.
- In-SERP answers quickly resolved roughly 85% of straightforward factual questions.
- Users often use AIO as a preview or shortcut, then click out to finish or validate (on brand sites, YouTube, coupon portals, and the like).
- Shopping carousels aid discovery more than closure. Expect reassessment clicks.
- Trust splits by…
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