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Google Search increasingly surfaces AI-generated content through features like AI Overviews (AIO) and Featured Snippets (FS), which users frequently rely on despite having no control over their presentation. Through a systematic algorithm…
Generative AI is being increasingly integrated into web search for the convenience it provides users. In this work, we aim to understand how generative AI disrupts web search by retrieving and presenting the information and sources…
We executed 24,000 search queries in 243 countries, generating 2.8 million AI and traditional search results in 2024 and 2025. We found a rapid global expansion of AI search and key trends that reflect important, previously hidden, policy…
AI-powered search systems are emerging as new information gatekeepers, fundamentally transforming how users access news and information. Despite their growing influence, the citation patterns of these systems remain poorly understood. We…
Generative search engines increasingly determine whether online information is merely discoverable, cited as a source, or actually absorbed into generated answers. This paper proposes a two-stage measurement framework for Generative Engine…
The rapid adoption of generative AI-powered search engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini is fundamentally reshaping information retrieval, moving from traditional ranked lists to synthesized, citation-backed answers. This shift…
AI-powered answer engines are inherently non-deterministic: identical queries submitted at different times can produce different responses and cite different sources. Despite this stochastic behavior, current approaches to measuring domain…
This study examines university students levels of satisfaction with generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools and traditional search engines as academic information sources. An electronic survey was distributed to students at U.S.…
Search engines increasingly display LLM-generated answers shown above organic links, shifting search from link lists to answer-first summaries. Publishers contend these summaries substitute for source pages and cannibalize traffic, while…
The growing accessibility of Large Language Models via conversational interfaces capable of responding to users' questions by drawing on, synthesizing, and citing information from the web (i.e., Generative Search Engines) has simplified the…
The rise of generative AI as a primary information source presents a paradigm shift from traditional web search. This paper presents a large-scale empirical study quantifying the fundamental differences between the results returned by…
As large language model-based chat systems become increasingly widely used, generative engine optimization (GEO) has emerged as an important problem for information access and retrieval. In classical search engines, results are…
Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered features have rapidly proliferated across mobile apps in various domains, including productivity, education, entertainment, and creativity. However, how users perceive, evaluate, and critique these AI…
Generative search systems are increasingly replacing link-based retrieval with AI-generated summaries, yet little is known about how these systems differ in sources, language, and fidelity to cited material. We examine responses to 11,000…
AI answer engines generate answers from retrieved pages but cite only a few sources. This makes visibility depend not just on ranking, but on being cited. We study competitive Generative Engine Optimization (GEO): when two retrieved…
The rapid integration of generative AI into academic writing has prompted widespread policy responses from journals and publishers. However, the effectiveness of these policies remains unclear. Here, we analyze 5,114 journals and over 5.2…
This paper reports on an audit study of generative AI systems (ChatGPT, Bing Chat, and Perplexity) which investigates how these new search engines construct responses and establish authority for topics of public importance. We collected…
Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly power generative search engines which, in turn, drive human information seeking and decision making at scale. The extent to which humans trust generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) can…
Generative AI tools are increasingly embedded in everyday work and learning, yet their fluency, opacity, and propensity to hallucinate mean that users must critically evaluate AI outputs rather than accept them at face value. The present…
The proliferation of AI-generated and AI-assisted text on the internet is feared to contribute to a degradation in semantic and stylistic diversity, factual accuracy, and other negative developments (sometimes subsumed under the Dead…