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Honestly I believe part of the shift is because we have no choice but using it. It’s literally just thrown in there and most people have become too lazy to scroll down to the actual websites. That’s also why we’ve always seen the huge dropoff in CTR for any page that ranks below first position.
If you’d have put “ai mode” simply in a separate tab in Google I don’t think the “adoption” would be as much. On top of that I feel like the top ranking pages have become less relevant or helpful when an AI overview is shown. That forces you even more to use it, instead of Google facilitating your own research into a certain topic.
The problem I’m personally having with it, is that when I want to do conversational research, I’ll just go and use Gemini, Claude or whatever. When I want to actually research stuff on the web I’ll use the search engine. I don’t want the AI overview crap in there. But that’s probably just my personal take.
