Google’s AI Overviews Favor Itself: 43% of Links Point Back to Google

Google’s AI Overviews link back to Google 43% of the time, furthering its walled garden effect, according to new data.

Highlights

• 43% of AI Overviews link back to Google’s search results.
• Longer search queries and low-volume keywords trigger AIOs more often.
• About 30% of queries trigger AIOs.

New research shows that Google’s AI observations often link to Google, which contributes to the Walled Garden Effect that encourages users to stay on Google’s site longer.

A study conducted by SE Ranking examined Google’s AI observations in five US states. It found that 43% of these AI answers included links redirecting users to Google’s search results. Each answer typically included 4-6 links to Google.

This matches recent data that shows that Google users make 10 clicks before moving on to other websites. These patterns suggest that Google is working to keep users within its ecosystem for longer.

Google AI Answers by Google, for Google

The SE Ranking study analyzed 100,013 keywords in five states: Colorado, Texas, California, New York and Washington, D.C.It tracked how Google’s AI summaries performed in different regions.

Although locations showed slight differences, the study found that Google.com is the most cited website in AI overviews.

Google appears in about 44% of all AI answers, significantly ahead of the next most-cited sources, YouTube, Reddit, Quora, and Wikipedia, appearing in about 13%.

The research states:

“Across all five states, AI Overviews appeared 141,507 times. Our analysis reveals that only 43.42% (61,437 instances) included links to traditional Google organic results, while the majority—56.58%—presented information without referencing those links.”

” Expanding the Boundaries of Google’s Walled Garden”

These findings complement recent analysis from Momentic, which found that Google’s “pages per visit” have reached 10, indicating that users click significantly more on Google before visiting other sites.Overall, this research suggests that Google is creating a more self-contained search experience:

• AI observations appear in nearly 30% of all searches.
• Almost half of these AI answers are linked to Google itself.
• Users now make 10 clicks before leaving Google.
• Longer, more specific queries trigger AI observations more often.

According to Momentic, Google still drives a lot of traffic outbound; 175.5 million visits in March.

However, it is less effective at sending users away than ChatGPT. Google generates only 0.6 external visits per user, while ChatGPT generates 1.4 visits per user.

Beyond the Basics: Additional Study Insights

The SE Ranking research uncovered several additional findings:

• AI overviews almost always appear alongside other SERP features (99.25% of the time), most commonly alongside the People Also Ask box (98.5%)The typical AI overview consists of about 1,766 characters (about 254 words) and cites an average of 13.3 sources.
• Medium-difficult keywords (21-40 on the difficulty scale) most often trigger AI overviews (33.4%), while highly competitive terms (81-100) rarely generate them (only 3.7%).
• Keywords with CPC values between $2-$5 generate the highest rate of AI overviews (32%), while expensive keywords ($10+) yield them the least (17.3%).
• Fashion and beauty have the lowest AI overview appearance rates (only 1.4%), followed by e-commerce (2.1%) and news/politics (3.8%).
• The longer the answer to an AI overview, the more likely it is to be More sources will be cited. Answers of less than 600 characters cited about five sources, while answers of more than 6,600 characters cited about 28 sources.

These statistics further emphasize how Google’s AI observations are reshaping search behavior.

This data emphasizes the need to optimize for multiple traffic sources while remaining visible in Google’s results pages.