A randomized field experiment finds Google’s AI Overviews reduce organic clicks to external websites by 38% on queries where they appear, while self-reported search satisfaction stays nearly unchanged when the summaries are removed. The working paper by researchers at the Indian School of Business and Carnegie Mellon University was posted to SSRN this month. Authors Saharsh Agarwal and Ananya Sen describe it as the first randomized field experiment to test how AI Overviews affect user behavior in a real browsing environment. How The Experiment Worked Agarwal and Sen built a Chrome extension that randomly assigned 1,065 U.S. participants to one of three groups. People were recruited from Prolific and used Chrome on desktop. They also had to meet minimum browsing-history thresholds, so the sample reflects active desktop Chrome users rather than all Google users. The control group saw Google Search normally. A “Hide AIO” group had the extension remove AI Overviews in real time.…