Saharsh Agarwal

"The search market is traditionally very symbiotic," Agarwal said on Eric Seufert's MDM podcast in July 2026. "Publishers depend on search engines, and search engines depend on publishers." Google had been keeping more users on its own pages for years through knowledge graphs and featured snippets, he said, but with AI Overviews the trend "has taken on an entirely different scale because of the prevalence of AI Overviews and the nature of the answers they generate, which reduces the need for people to click."

Only Google could run an experiment on millions of its users, so Agarwal and Sen built a custom Chrome extension that recorded the searches and clicks of about 1,000 people and, for a randomly chosen group, hid AI Overviews whenever Google showed them. Their paper, The Impact of Google AI Overviews on Publisher Traffic and User Experience, found that overviews appeared on about 41% of observed queries. Where they appeared, they cut outbound organic clicks by 39.8%, from 0.62 to 0.37 per search, and raised zero-click searches by 34.5%, with no change in sponsored clicks or in how often people searched.

Google has said that AI Overviews mainly remove low-value clicks. "We find that the quality of the clicks was not different across the two groups," Agarwal said. Visitors in both groups spent similar time on the pages they reached. People who had overviews hidden also rated their search experience the same as everyone else. "It is one of those products where unless you really make it salient and give it the prime spot, users don't care about it too much," he said, while cautioning that the survey measures were self-reported. A third group that was sent to Google's AI Mode reported a sharp drop: "In the AI Mode arm, we saw a huge decline in all the experience numbers."

He does not expect Google to change the design by itself. Of ideas such as making overviews optional or showing only a line or two by default, he said, "I don't think those are going to happen without regulation."

Agarwal earned a bachelor's degree in electronics and instrumentation from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, in 2015 and worked as a research associate at the Indian School of Business from 2016 to 2018. He completed a PhD in information systems and management at Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz College in 2023, where he met Sen, and returned to ISB as an assistant professor that year. Besides platform governance and competition policy, his recent research covers digital well-being online.