Google’s head of Search, Liz Reid, told Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast that the AI overview is reducing “highlighted clicks” on publishers’ pages, continuing an argument she has made publicly since last year.
Reid appeared on the April 23 episode of Odd Lots. Host Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway asked how AI Overview affects publisher traffic and ad revenue.
Reid said
Reid described what he called “bounce clicks” as the AI Overview click phase decreases.
He said that users who click quickly and return to the search do not need to visit the page anymore because they find the truth in the Overview. Long-term readers still click. He acknowledged a few ad clicks on some questions but said the question volume balanced this out. The controversy coincides with Reid’s points in other public appearances.
The pattern
Reid published a Google blog post in August saying that the volume of organic clicks from Google Search to websites has been “relatively stable” year over year and that “quality clicks,” defined as visits where users don’t click immediately, have increased.
In an October Wall Street Journal interview, he loosely used the term “bounced clicks” and said that ad revenue for AI Overviews was stable.
Bloomberg’s look does the same basic thing Reid did in August, describing some lost clicks as low-value visits where users would have quickly returned to search.
What Reid Can Say
In none of these three appearances did Reid provide supporting data.
His August blog post does not include charts, percentages, or year-to-year comparisons. At Bloomberg, he told Weisenthal and Alloway that Google tracks how often people come to search as one of its key metrics, without providing numbers.
Weisenthal and Alloway asked about traffic and monetization, but the interview did not include follow-up questions asking for evidence of Reid’s explanation.
Google has not publicly shared data that would allow outside observers to test those differences.
What the Independent Data Shows
Chartbeat data published in the Reuters Institute’s Journalism and Technology Trends and Predictions 2026 report found that the global publisher’s Google searches fell by almost a third. Google Discover referrals are down 21% year over year for all 2,500 publisher websites.
An analysis by Seer Interactive found that the organic click-through rate for questions about AI Overviews dropped from 1.76% in 2024 to 0.61% in 2025, a 61% decrease. Seer noted that those queries tend to search for information that used to have low CTRs.
A Pew Research Center study of 68,000 actual search queries found users clicked on results 8% of the time when the AI Overview appeared, compared to 15% when they did not.
Digital Content Next, a trade body whose members include The New York Times, Condé Nast, and Vox, reported an average year-over-year decline of 10% in Google search traffic for 19 member publishers between May and June 2025. DCN CEO Jason Kint said at the time that member data provided “ground truth” about what was happening to publisher traffic.
Why This Matters
Reid’s definition of “bounce clicks” answers the question the data raises, but he answers it without your own data. That’s important to remember when evaluating any claim from a rating agency.
The business owner can’t confirm with Reid’s Bloomberg look that the AI Overview is only reducing low-value clicks or cutting down on query types. Independent data measures total clicks and click-through rate, not the subset of clicks that Reid defines as low-value. If Google has internal data that separates the two, it hasn’t shared it in the eight months since the August blog post.
Looking Forward
Reid said Google measures how often people return to Search. That signal is tracked by Google. Publishers need a traffic metric, but Google hasn’t shared it yet. Until that happens, “click hopping” should be considered a claim rather than a discovery.
