Nick Fox, Google's head of search, said on Friday that Google's AI Mode and AI Overviews - its AI search features - send billions of clicks to websites every week. He said Google Search overall is still sending billions of clicks daily, is only seeing growth, and that AI Search does send clicks.
Nick Fox wrote on LinkedIn, "We’re now sending billions of clicks to websites every week through AI features in Search alone." It was designed to do so, Fox said: "We’ve designed our AI features in Search to connect people to websites." And overall, he added, "We continue to send billions of clicks to the web every day through Search." And people "use Google Search more than ever," he added.
He later wrote on X:
We’ve been continuing to improve how we show links in our AI features in Search, to make it easy for people to click to websites. One of my personal gripes (as the team knows!) is whenever I can’t easily find a link for something I want to go deeper on.
Here is a screenshot of this post:
Liz Reid, the VP of Google Search (real head of search), reshared what Nick Fox wrote and added:
We've always believed that when you design technology around how people actually think and talk, it expands curiosity rather than limits it. It’s awesome to see how our AI features are helping people explore the web and connect with the creators and publishers they love.
Here is the X post:
We’ve been continuing to improve how we show links in our AI features in Search, to make it easy for people to click to websites. One of my personal gripes (as the team knows!) is whenever I can’t easily find a link for something I want to go deeper on.
— Nick Fox (@thefox) July 17, 2026
As we’ve continued to…
Google is not saying it sends more clicks to websites than it did before; rather, Google is saying it still sends billions of clicks and that AI Search features send billions of clicks weekly. The reality is that you and I see less traffic from Google Search today than we did before Google launched AI features in Google Search.
The recent Google zero-click study showed Google now only sends 27.6% of its clicks to the open web and that great decoupling feels real; CTR seems down - even Pew Research Center said so. Just this morning, the Press Gazzete covered how Google Search traffic will halve by Q3 2027. But Google has continued to deny it, saying clicks are stable, the third party studies are flawed, web publsihing is not dead and so on.
Google even built out the AI performance reports in Search Console but excluded clicks. This is because Google is "continuing to work with website owners to understand what insights will be most helpful to inform their strategies" and Google doesn't think those are clicks. Nope, because Google does not want us to see our click-through rates from AI Search features compared to traditional search features.
That being said, Google has made efforts to improve clicks with preferred sources, top stories in AI Overviews, recipe improvements in AI search, and other link improvements in the AI features.
At least someone is able to track clicks from AI Overviews and AI Mode. :)
— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) July 17, 2026
Google continues to tout the importance of driving clicks to the open web - so we will see.
Forum discussion at LinkedIn and X.
Update: So why did Nick Fox post this metric?
So this is why Google came out with that billions of clicks from AI features - the NY Times was working on a piece named "Google Is Building an A.I. Fence Around the Internet It Once Championed" https://t.co/TYzKXC1hTw https://t.co/RMhIjwyM9Q pic.twitter.com/5D2bvNVnzR
— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) July 20, 2026
