Demonstration venue · read-only. Every page can be browsed; the buttons that would change it are switched off. Create an account to run TaxoReview on your own data. A simulation from public publication records: the people listed were not invited and did not agree to review.
? Tutorial for this page

How Generative AI Disrupts Search: An Empirical Study of Google Search, Gemini, and AI Overviews

sigir26-143 · Full research paper · Riley Grossman, Songjiang Liu, Michael K. Chen, Mike Smith, Cristian Borcea, Yi Chen
User Behavior and Search Interaction · 50% Evidence Selection and Context Refin · 50%
Abstract

Generative AI is being increasingly integrated into web search for the convenience it provides users. In this work, we aim to understand how generative AI disrupts web search by retrieving and presenting the information and sources differently from traditional search engines. We introduce a public benchmark dataset of 11,500 user queries to support our study and future research of generative search. We compare the search results returned by Google's search engine, the accompanying AI Overview (AIO), and Gemini Flash 2.5 for each query. We have made several key findings. First, we find that for 51.5% of representative, real-user queries, AIOs are generated, and are displayed above the organic search results. Controversial questions frequently result in an AIO. Second, we show that the retrieved sources are substantially different for each search engine (<0.2 average Jaccard similarity). Traditional Google search is significantly more likely to retrieve information from popular or institutional websites in government or education, while generative search engines are significantly more likely to retrieve Google-owned content. Third, we observe that websites that block Google's AI crawler are significantly less likely to be retrieved by AIOs, despite having access to the content. Finally, AIOs are less consistent when processing two runs of the same query, and are less robust to minor query edits. Our findings have important implications for understanding how generative search impacts website visibility, the effectiveness of generative engine optimization techniques, and the information users receive. We call for revenue frameworks to foster a sustainable and mutually beneficial ecosystem for publishers and generative search providers.

Assigned reviewers

#ReviewerMatchWhy (closest evidence publications in the taxonomy)
1 Falk Scholer
48
69 On the Use of LLMs for Relevance Labelling (2026) User Behavior and Search Interaction
69 Enhancing Human Annotation: Leveraging Large Language Models and Efficient Batch Processing (2024) User Behavior and Search Interaction
67 Classifying Term Variants in Query Formulation (2025) User Behavior and Search Interaction
2 Shuaiqiang Wang
41
65 FULTR: A Large-Scale Fusion Learning to Rank Dataset and Its Application for Satisfaction-Oriented Ranking (2025) User Behavior and Search Interaction
64 M2oERank: Multi-Objective Mixture-of-Experts Enhanced Ranking for Satisfaction-Oriented Web Search (2025) User Behavior and Search Interaction
63 RankExpert: A Mixture of Textual-and-Behavioral Experts for Multi-Objective Learning-to-Rank in Web Search (2025) User Behavior and Search Interaction

Area chair

Area chairMatch
Ziyi Ye 53
Area-chair candidates (8)
Ziyi Ye assigned 5314 papers
Zhijing Wu 0001 469 papers
Xiaoxi Li 0005 4315 papers
Fernando Diaz 0001 4012 papers
Hongjin Qian 3812 papers
Jun Xu 0001 362 papers
Xiaoxue Zang 334 papers
Chenyan Xiong 3215 papers

Candidates from the panel ranked by match score

#ReviewerMatchLoadWhy
1 Sara Allawati 66 3
67 A Comparative Analysis of Linguistic and Retrieval Diversity in LLM-Generated Search Queries (2025) User Behavior and Search Interaction
59 From Lab to Reality: An Eye-tracking Study of How Users are Influenced to Search in the Era of GenAI (2026) User Behavior and Search Interaction
2 Jiqun Liu 62 3
59 IWILDS'25: The 5th International Workshop on Investigating Learning During Web Search (2025) User Behavior and Search Interaction
59 A Reference-Dependent Model for Web Search Evaluation: Understanding and Measuring the Experience of Boundedly Rational Users (2023) User Behavior and Search Interaction
3 Vuong Thanh Tung 62 3
66 Does More Context Help? Effects of Context Window and Application Source on Retrieval Performance (2022) User Behavior and Search Interaction
65 Spoken Conversational Context Improves Query Auto-completion in Web Search (2021) User Behavior and Search Interaction
4 Fan Zhang 0053 62 3
66 Towards a Better Understanding of Query Reformulation Behavior in Web Search (2021) User Behavior and Search Interaction
64 Incorporating Query Reformulating Behavior into Web Search Evaluation (2021) User Behavior and Search Interaction
6 Jaime Arguello 50 3
65 The effect of aggregated search coherence on search behavior (2012) User Behavior and Search Interaction
65 The Effects of Vertical Rank and Border on Aggregated Search Coherence and Search Behavior (2014) User Behavior and Search Interaction
7 Falk Scholer assigned 48 3
69 On the Use of LLMs for Relevance Labelling (2026) User Behavior and Search Interaction
69 Enhancing Human Annotation: Leveraging Large Language Models and Efficient Batch Processing (2024) User Behavior and Search Interaction
8 Mark D. Smucker 48 3
66 Effective User Interaction for High-Recall Retrieval: Less is More (2018) User Behavior and Search Interaction
66 A System for Efficient High-Recall Retrieval (2018) User Behavior and Search Interaction
9 Romain Deffayet 47 3
59 Evaluating the Robustness of Click Models to Policy Distributional Shift (2023) User Behavior and Search Interaction
59 An Offline Metric for the Debiasedness of Click Models (2023) User Behavior and Search Interaction
11 Yujia Zhou 0002 44 3
68 Intent-Oriented Dynamic Interest Modeling for Personalized Web Search (2024) User Behavior and Search Interaction
68 Incorporating Explicit Subtopics in Personalized Search (2023) User Behavior and Search Interaction
12 Paul Thomas 0001 44 3
69 Large Language Models can Accurately Predict Searcher Preferences (2024) User Behavior and Search Interaction
61 User Models, Metrics and Measures of Search: A Tutorial on the C/W/L Evaluation Framework (2021) User Behavior and Search Interaction
14 Saber Zerhoudi 43 3
65 In-Browser Agents for Search Assistance (2026) User Behavior and Search Interaction
62 From SERPs to Agents: A Platform for Comparative Studies of Information Interaction (2026) User Behavior and Search Interaction
15 Xuanhui Wang 41 3
63 Learning with Sparse and Biased Feedback for Personal Search (2018) User Behavior and Search Interaction
63 Revisiting Two-tower Models for Unbiased Learning to Rank (2022) User Behavior and Search Interaction
16 Shuaiqiang Wang assigned 41 3
65 FULTR: A Large-Scale Fusion Learning to Rank Dataset and Its Application for Satisfaction-Oriented Ranking (2025) User Behavior and Search Interaction
64 M2oERank: Multi-Objective Mixture-of-Experts Enhanced Ranking for Satisfaction-Oriented Web Search (2025) User Behavior and Search Interaction
18 Tingyu Song 39 3
66 IFIR: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Instruction-Following in Expert-Domain Information Retrieval (2025) User Behavior and Search Interaction
58 LimRank: Less is More for Reasoning-Intensive Information Reranking (2025) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement
19 Leif Azzopardi 39 3
66 Query quality: user ratings and system predictions (2010) User Behavior and Search Interaction
61 User Models, Metrics and Measures of Search: A Tutorial on the C/W/L Evaluation Framework (2021) User Behavior and Search Interaction
20 Idan Szpektor 38 3
59 Predicting web searcher satisfaction with existing community-based answers (2011) User Behavior and Search Interaction
36 DisentQA: Disentangling Parametric and Contextual Knowledge with Counterfactual Question Answering (2023) Knowledge Conflict and Faithfulness
22 Weiwei Sun 0001 37 3
59 Direct Retrieval-augmented Optimization: Synergizing Knowledge Selection and Language Models (2026) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement
39 Simulating User Satisfaction for the Evaluation of Task-oriented Dialogue Systems (2021) Conversational Search and Retrieval
23 Navve Wasserman 36 3
43 DocReRank: Single-Page Hard Negative Query Generation for Training Multi-Modal RAG Rerankers (2025) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval
43 REAL-MM-RAG: A Real-World Multi-Modal Retrieval Benchmark (2025) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval
24 Tetsuya Sakai 36 3
33 Relevance Assessments for Web Search Evaluation: Should We Randomise or Prioritise the Pooled Documents? (2022) Test Collection Construction and Pooling
33 On the Ordering of Pooled Web Pages, Gold Assessments, and Bronze Assessments (2024) Test Collection Construction and Pooling
26 Zhen Qin 0001 36 3
63 Cross-Positional Attention for Debiasing Clicks (2021) User Behavior and Search Interaction
63 Revisiting Two-tower Models for Unbiased Learning to Rank (2022) User Behavior and Search Interaction
27 Jing Liu 0022 36 3
64 Reinforced Informativeness Optimization for Long-Form Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2026) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement
59 REAR: A Relevance-Aware Retrieval-Augmented Framework for Open-Domain Question Answering (2024) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement
28 Kaixin Ma 35 3
64 Chain-of-Note: Enhancing Robustness in Retrieval-Augmented Language Models (2024) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement
60 Dense X Retrieval: What Retrieval Granularity Should We Use? (2024) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement
29 Keping Bi 35 3
68 Beyond Relevance: Utility-Centric Retrieval in the LLM Era (2026) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement
64 A Study of Context Dependencies in Multi-page Product Search (2019) User Behavior and Search Interaction
30 Negar Arabzadeh 34 3
64 Can QPP Choose the Right Query variant? Evaluating Query Variant Selection for RAG Pipelines (2026) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement
36 Query Performance Prediction: From Ad-hoc to Conversational Search (2023) Query Performance Prediction
31 Han Li 0005 33 3
59 QE-RAG: A Robust Retrieval-Augmented Generation Benchmark for Query Entry Errors (2026) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement
36 Lasso: Large Language Model-based User Simulator for Cross-Domain Recommendation (2025) User Simulation for Interactive Systems
33 Farzad Shami 33 3
32 GROKE: Vision-Free Navigation Instruction Evaluation via Graph Reasoning on OpenStreetMap (2026) Reasoning Evaluation and Benchmarks
31 From Single to Multi-agent Reasoning: Advancing GeneGPT for Genomics QA (2026) Retrieval-Augmented and Open-Domain QA
34 Daiting Shi 33 3
62 Utility-Focused LLM Annotation for Retrieval and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement
34 Accurate and Efficient Personalized Query Rewriting in Baidu Search (2026) Query Reformulation and Expansion
35 Jialong Wu 0007 33 3
49 WebWalker: Benchmarking LLMs in Web Traversal (2025) Agentic and Deep Search RAG
34 OmniThink: Expanding Knowledge Boundaries in Machine Writing through Thinking (2025) Deep Research and Report Generation
36 Yong Li 0004 33 3
59 Towards an Inclusive Mobile Web: A Dataset and Framework for Focusability in UI Accessibility (2025) User Behavior and Search Interaction
36 PG-Agent: An Agent Powered by Page Graph (2025) Multi-Agent and Tool-Use Orchestration
38 Gustavo Penha 32 3
69 As It Was: Aligning LLM Search Evaluation with Historical User Preferences (2026) User Behavior and Search Interaction
32 Pairwise Review-Based Explanations for Voice Product Search (2022) Conversational Search and Retrieval