*New* CSSS Seminar: Impact of AI Search Summaries on Website Traffic: Evidence from Google AI Overviews and Wikipedia (10/07/26)
Posted: 2026-09-25 11:39:33 (Local Events)
Search engines increasingly display AI-generated answers above organic links, potentially displacing traffic to upstream publishers. We estimate the impact of Google’s AI Overviews (AIO) on Wikipedia’s search traffic using AIO’s staggered geographic rollout and Wikipedia’s multilingual structure. Our difference-in-differences design compares monthly external-search referrals to English Wikipedia articles with referrals to the same articles in German and French, and finds that default AIO availability reduced English search traffic by 5.45% and 4.82% , respectively. Our results suggest that answer-producing digital intermediaries can materially reallocate attention away from informational publishers, with implications for content monetization, search platform design, and policy. Find meeting details at this link.
Hema Yoganarasimhan is a faculty member at the Foster School of Business at the University of Washington. She is recognized as one of the leading experts in quantitative marketing. Hema’s research brings together large-scale marketing data, economic theory, econometrics, generative AI, and machine learning tools to help firms optimize and automate their marketing decisions. She currently serves as a senior editor at Marketing Science.
Date: 10/07/2026
Time: 12:30-1:30 PM
Deadline: 10/07/2026
Location: Savery 409