Pew Research (July 22, 2025) — real-browsing field study of 900 US adults / 68,879 March 2025 searches: clicks to traditional results 8% with an AI summary vs 15% without; only 1% clicked a link inside the AI summary

Claim: Pew Research Center, published July 22, 2025, analysed real browsing data from 900 US adults across 68,879 searches in March 2025.

Quote (verbatim): "Users who encountered an AI summary clicked on a traditional search result link in 8% of all visits. Those who did not encounter an AI summary clicked on a search result nearly twice as often (15% of visits)... This occurred in just 1% of all visits to pages with such a summary" (referring to clicks on a source link inside the AI summary).

Source: Pew Research Center, July 22, 2025. Google publicly disputed the methodology as "not representative."

Confidence: Verified (highest-quality field-based dataset on this question). Pew has no commercial incentive to spin.

Why this matters for Candid: The most defensible single statistic for the "AI Overviews are halving clicks on the queries they appear on" claim. Use Pew first, vendor studies (Seer Interactive (September 2025) — 3,119 informational queries across 42 organisations / 25.1M organic impressions (June 2024 → Sep 2025): organic CTR fell 61% (1.76% → 0.61%), paid CTR fell 68% (19.7% → 6.34%), Ahrefs December 2025 re-run (published February 4, 2026) — for every 100 clicks you could historically earn for a top-ranking page, Google now keeps 58 (up from 34.5% click loss in April 2025)) second.