[Submitted on 5 Feb 2026 (
[v1](https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.18455v1)), last revised 2 Sep 2026 (this version, v6)]
[View PDF](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.18455)
[HTML (experimental)](https://arxiv.org/html/2602.18455v6)
Abstract: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.
Submission history #
From: Mehrzad Khosravi [
[view email](https://arxiv.org/show-email/b75349c8/2602.18455)]
**Thu, 5 Feb 2026 01:31:44 UTC (1,474 KB)**
[\[v1\]](https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.18455v1)
**Thu, 26 Mar 2026 01:10:28 UTC (1 KB)**
[\[v2\]](https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.18455v2)
*(withdrawn)*
**Fri, 17 Apr 2026 20:18:13 UTC (1,488 KB)**
[\[v3\]](https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.18455v3)
**Tue, 12 May 2026 07:35:59 UTC (1,488 KB)**
[\[v4\]](https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.18455v4)
**Wed, 26 Aug 2026 07:40:54 UTC (51 KB)**
[\[v5\]](https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.18455v5)
**[v6]** Wed, 2 Sep 2026 20:53:31 UTC (1,812 KB)
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