How Generative AI Disrupts Search: An Empirical Study of Google Search, Gemini, and AI Overviews
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
| # | Reviewer | Match | Why (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 |
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| 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 chair | Match | |
|---|---|---|
| Ziyi Ye | 53 |
Area-chair candidates (8)
| Ziyi Ye assigned | 53 | 14 papers | |
| Zhijing Wu 0001 | 46 | 9 papers | |
| Xiaoxi Li 0005 | 43 | 15 papers | |
| Fernando Diaz 0001 | 40 | 12 papers | |
| Hongjin Qian | 38 | 12 papers | |
| Jun Xu 0001 | 36 | 2 papers | |
| Xiaoxue Zang | 33 | 4 papers | |
| Chenyan Xiong | 32 | 15 papers |
Candidates from the panel ranked by match score
| # | Reviewer | Match | Load | Why | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |
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| 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 |