Google Links To Itself: 43% Of AI Overviews Point Back To Google

A new study shows that Google’s AI answers often send users back to Google’s own pages. This makes users stay on Google’s site longer, instead of visiting other websites.

The study was done by SE Ranking and looked at AI Overviews in five U.S. states. It found that 43% of these answers had links going back to Google’s search results. Most of these AI answers had about 4 to 6 links to Google.

This matches other reports showing that people often click around 10 times on Google before going to a different website. It looks like Google is trying to keep people inside its system for longer.

How Google Uses Its Own Links in AI Results

SE Ranking looked at 100,013 keywords from five places: Colorado, Texas, California, New York, and Washington, D.C. The goal was to see how Google’s AI answers work in different areas.

While results changed a little by location, the study showed that Google.com was the most linked site in AI Overviews. Google appeared in about 44% of the AI answers. This was much more than other popular sites like YouTube, Reddit, Quora, and Wikipedia, which showed up only about 13% of the time.

Following the Walled Garden Pattern

This new data adds to what was found in another report by Momentic. That study showed that users now click around 10 times on Google before visiting any other website. This means users are spending more time and clicks inside Google.

The research shows that Google is making its search more focused on its own content:

• AI Overviews show up in about 30% of all searches.
• Almost half of these AI answers link back to Google.
• People make about 10 clicks within Google before leaving.
• Longer and more detailed questions are more likely to show AI Overviews.

Even though Google still sends a lot of traffic to other sites (175.5 million visits in March, as per Momentic), it doesn’t send as many users away as ChatGPT. Google leads to about 0.6 visits to other sites per user, while ChatGPT sends about 1.4.

More Important Stats from the Study

The SE Ranking study found more interesting results:

• AI Overviews show up with other features on the search page 99.25% of the time. The most common one is “People Also Ask,” which appears 98.5% of the time.
• A typical AI Overview has around 1,766 characters, or about 254 words, and it includes links to about 13 sources.
• Keywords with medium difficulty (21–40) bring up AI Overviews the most often (33.4%). Very hard keywords (81–100) almost never bring them up (just 3.7%).
• Keywords with a cost-per-click (CPC) between $2 and $5 are most likely to show AI Overviews (32%). Expensive keywords over $10 show them the least (17.3%).
• Topics like Fashion and Beauty (1.4%), E-Commerce (2.1%), and News/Politics (3.8%) have the fewest AI Overviews.
• The longer the AI Overview is, the more sources it shows. Short answers under 600 characters have about five sources. Longer ones over 6,600 characters show around 28.

This data shows how AI Overviews are changing the way people search. It also reminds us that we should focus on more than just Google to get website traffic, while still staying visible in Google’s search results.