AI Mode Study Counted the Clicks and Missed the Bigger Loss, Victorious Says

The AI Mode study measured lost clicks. Victorious says it missed lost customers: buyers who research with AI never consider a company the answer doesn't name.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA, UNITED STATES, October 8, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- A controlled experiment that routed Google users into AI Mode cut clicks to outside websites by 18.8 percentage points. Victorious, a search agency that helps brands earn AI search visibility, said that while the study measured the click-loss publishers feel and it didn’t report on the business impact on companies whose customers research before they make a purchase.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and Northeastern University ran a preregistered field experiment with 1,100 US Google users, assigning each to a version of Google Search and tracking behavior through a browser extension. Participants placed in AI Mode clicked through to external sites 18.8 points less often than those on standard search, and they used competing search engines 11.2 points more often. Hiding AI Overviews raised click-through by 8.8 points. The paper was posted to arXiv in August and has circulated widely since.

Publishers have read the result as confirmation of a traffic problem. Victorious reads it differently for business-to-business and other high-research categories, where buyers now use an AI assistant to decide which companies to consider before they visit anyone's site.

"When your company is not in those answers, you are not in the room when they are deciding who is even worth considering," said Michael Transon, CEO of Victorious. "That is way more valuable and way more of a business impact than just a couple of clicks that you might be missing out on."

The agency's view is that a click is the last step in a decision that increasingly happens inside the answer. A buyer who asks an assistant for vendors in a category receives a short list, and the companies named on it get the website visit, the demo request, or the referral. That’s an invisible consequence of a low-click environment. The companies left off don’t know they were excluded, because no analytics tool records a shortlist a buyer never clicked.

That changes what a marketing team should measure. Victorious tracks whether a brand is named at all in answers to its category questions, and separately, how often the answer links to the brand's website. Transon recommends looking at session traffic from AI assistants as a floor rather than a full measure of the channel, since most traffic arrives later as branded search or is misattributed as direct traffic.

The study also found that people pushed into AI Mode drifted toward Bing and DuckDuckGo. That’s a problem for Google, but ultimately, it doesn’t change much for brands, because other search engines have their own AI answers, and the way a brand earns a place on recommendation lists is similar on every engine: being mentioned on other websites. That is the one lever Victorious has found moves the needle on every platform at once.

Victorious covered the study in the Oct. 1 issue of The Growth Index, its weekly search intelligence briefing, and discusses measurement for AI search in The Search Signal podcast.

About Victorious
Victorious is a search agency founded in 2013 that helps brands grow their visibility in Google and in AI search platforms including ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews. The agency has been named Search Agency of the Year five times and is headquartered in San Francisco.

Jill Maldonado
Victorious
hello@victorious.com
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