When Search Stops Sending Traffic: AI Overviews and the Quantity-Quality Trade-Off in E-Commerce

Search engines are increasingly shifting from link-based referral systems to answer-centered interfaces that satisfy user intent directly on the results page. Google’s AI Overviews (AIOV) are a leading manifestation of this transition and may materially affect how e-commerce websites acquire and monetize organic traffic. This study examines the rollout of AIOV as a staggered platform shock and asks two questions. Whether AIOV reduces Google organic acquisition for e-commerce websites, and whether any decline in traffic is accompanied by an improvement in the quality of the traffic that remains. We combine large-scale Google Analytics data from 100 e-commerce websites, comprising approximately 33.5 million observations, with country-level AIOV rollout timing and estimate a stacked event-study design comparing Google Organic Search with Bing Organic Search within the same domain-country-week setting. The results show a clear and economically meaningful decline in organic sessions after AIOV rollout. At the same time, conversion-rate proxies increase, while revenue-per-session effects are weaker and average order value effects are negligible. Upstream Search Console evidence further shows that informational queries experience a decline in top-position impression share after rollout, consistent with a reallocation of attention away from prominent organic exposure and toward on-platform answer resolution. Taken together, the findings indicate that AI Overviews compress top-of-funnel acquisition while only partially improving the commercial quality of surviving traffic, highlighting a firm-level quantity-quality trade-off in generative search.

Working Paper