Google’s AI Overviews reduced search referrals to English Wikipedia by around 5%, according to a University of Washington working paper revised September 2. But the research leaves an important question unanswered: does being cited in an AI answer help an individual page retain visitors?
Researchers compared English articles with their German and French counterparts around Google’s 2024 rollout. Those comparisons produced estimated declines of 5.45% and 4.82%, respectively.
The figures describe changes in search referrals across the samples. The researchers did not observe which individual searches displayed AI Overviews, so the study cannot establish the traffic effect of appearing inside one. Its causal interpretation also depends on the comparison groups providing a reasonable picture of what would have happened without the rollout.
For publishers evaluating AI visibility, the practical question should therefore remain specific: which cited pages gain visits, and what do those visitors do? A citation count alone cannot answer that.
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