Google's AI answers now hijack 43% of searches, up from 15% a year ago

The search engine you grew up with is officially dead. Google’s AI Overviews now appear in 43% of searches, according to fresh data from Similarweb—a dramatic jump from just 15% a year ago. That’s not an experiment anymore. That’s the product.

The shift is fundamentally altering how people interact with information. Instead of firing off a few keywords and clicking through to a website, users are now having longer, more conversational exchanges with Google itself. Similarweb found that the average length of searches is rising, a signal that people are treating AI as a research partner rather than a signpost. AI Mode visits alone more than doubled, climbing from 126 million in June 2025 to 279 million by May 2026.

Publishers, predictably, are not celebrating. The blue links that once sustained entire digital media companies are being replaced by AI-generated answers that cite sources without sending any traffic. It’s a raw deal, and some are starting to push back. Cloudflare recently rolled out tools that let publishers block AI crawlers unless companies pay for access through its marketplace. Imagine that—a toll road for the bots scraping your content.

There’s one sliver of good news on the ChatGPT side. A May 7 search update saw the proportion of visits landing on actual webpages more than double from 25% to nearly 60% by the end of the month. When prominent links are available, users do click. But that’s a footnote in a larger story. Google is no longer a gateway to the web. It’s the destination, and it’s getting harder to remember what the old internet even felt like.