this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2026
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Are there any statistics on how many LLM chatbot users actually click on the source links?
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/07/22/google-users-are-less-likely-to-click-on-links-when-an-ai-summary-appears-in-the-results/
That's just for Google's AI summaries, but it's the only one with actual methodology disclosed I could find on a quick (non-AI) search.
Plenty of SEO mills with their own "studies" too, and the trend is similar. People don't interact with the source sites or if they do it's extremely seldom.
They (SEO mills) are currently trying to flip the gaslight towards "Worry not dear Webmaster, now you just have to make sure your content is now formed so it's engaging for AI search and engage able right from the AI!" type shit.
I'm tired boss, and I'm not even generally (as in, in all aspects) anti-AI. Yet, I guess.
Ah yes, I've noticed lots of SEO consultant companies are trying to pivot into "we'll help you to make AI scrape your website more so you show up in the AI search".
I hadn't seen the study before, thanks. That's what I expected, honestly. I guess you could argue they are still building brand awareness, because people subconsciously note the brand as the source, but I don't think that amounts to much.
Great question, I wish I knew. I know when I'm on a deep dive I will hit the links as there is other information or other articles the scrapped site has.
I mean just about every metric I've seen suggests most websites that see an increase in scraping see a decrease in actual human visitors. I doubt there's much distinction between chat and search users - the goal of these services is to drop click-through rates.
Oh, definitely. They are reinventing the old portals concept. That's why I don't think Reddit actually wants to encourage the scraping (partly also because they sell data themselves to build LLM, but that's another thing)
I don't know how many do, but they're fools if they don't.
You'd think that since those links are there, that the information on those links matches what that LLM says, and thus not a hallucination, but at least twice, I've found the information straight up wasn't there, or the LLM had misread / misinterpreted the page's content.
But then I may not be a regular user. I ask a question maybe once every one to two weeks because a regular search finds nothing and, like I say, I prefer to check the sources.
I do for things where I want to be accurate, but sometimes it seems like I’m the only one
On the other hand I advised my teen to buy the wrong battery because I didn’t click into the results for “what battery do i need to replace in my Subaru key?”