Google’s AI Overviews are forcing a new question on the web: What happens when a website helps answer a search, but never gets the visit? That question sits at the center of a new working paper posted to SSRN this month. Titled “ Google AI Overviews and Publisher Traffic: Evidence from a Field Experiment ,” the paper was written by Saharsh Agarwal of the Indian School of Business and Ananya Sen of Carnegie Mellon University. The authors describe it as the first randomized field experiment to test how AI Overviews affect user behavior in a real browsing environment. For years, the search bargain was simple. Websites created useful content, Google surfaced it and users clicked through for the full answer. AI Overviews are changing that path. They place a summarized answer above the organic listings, often before the user reaches the sources that helped shape the response. The result is not the end of SEO. But it may be the beginning of a harder era for organic traffic , where visibility alone is not enough.…