Ananya Sen
Associate Professor
Carnegie Mellon University
Ananya Sen is an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz College in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he studies platforms, media markets, and the online information ecosystem. With Saharsh Agarwal of the Indian School of Business, he ran a field experiment showing that Google's AI Overviews cut outbound organic clicks by 39.8% on the searches where they appeared.
Hiding AI Overviews from Google Users
"This was our way of providing reasonably neutral evidence as a neutral party," Sen said on Eric Seufert's MDM podcast in July 2026. "Our main job is to pin them down rigorously and report them and then contribute to these conversations."
The study, The Impact of Google AI Overviews on Publisher Traffic and User Experience, used a custom Chrome extension to give about 1,000 US users either standard Google Search or the same page with AI Overviews hidden. Where an overview appeared, it reduced outbound organic clicks by 39.8% and raised zero-click searches by 34.5%, with no change in sponsored clicks or in how often people searched. Visits that did reach publishers looked the same on bounce rates and time spent, and an exploratory AI Mode arm pointed to even larger traffic losses.
Smaller Publishers and Licensing Deals
On the MDM podcast, Sen worried that licensing agreements between Google and large outlets could push other publishers further out of view. "I fear that here the smaller outlets and smaller publishers might lose out the most," he said.
He argued that payment alone would not fix the problem. "If you don't get access to the traffic, then it's very hard to build a brand, to convert users into subscribers," he said, and he suggested pairing compensation with links that are more prominent.
From Toulouse to Carnegie Mellon
Sen received his PhD in economics from the Toulouse School of Economics in Toulouse, France, and was a postdoctoral associate at the MIT Sloan School of Management before joining Carnegie Mellon. He received tenure at Heinz College in 2025.
His work has appeared in Management Science, Nature, and PNAS. He is an Andrew Carnegie Fellow from the class of 2024 and an associate editor at Management Science and Information Economics and Policy.