By Eric Van Buskirk
Publication Date: 2026-05-26 09:00:00
If a user types your brand name into Google or Chrome, you might reasonably assume they are about to visit your website. Google has always been a place people pass through on the way to somewhere else, but AI Overviews are changing how long that passage takes, and what happens during it.
To assess these changes, I analyzed 846,000 U.S.-based Google Search sessions from anonymized clickstream data for February and March 2026.
We measured what click and ranking data cannot capture: what people read, skim, and scan on the search results page before they make decisions. Where does their cursor travel? How far do they scroll? Do they reverse direction? And how does all of that change when Google’s AI Overview is present?
Cursor tracking is a useful proxy for attention because cursor position often aligns with gaze during active reading and decision tasks, but it is less reliable during passive, distracted, or idle browsing. Cursor positions were sampled at one-second intervals during…
