An OpenAI software engineer put the core tension of AI search in blunt terms: “No matter how prominently we show the links, users won’t click.”
The comment, reported by The New York Times and cited in a publishers’ summary judgment brief, was written in February 2023. The same brief quotes Nick Turley, OpenAI’s head of ChatGPT, saying there was “no good reason to click” a source link once ChatGPT has already answered.
Before you burn down the organic playbook: this is one side’s argument in a consolidated copyright case in federal court in New York. The court has not ruled.
What the filing claims
The publishers’ brief, filed Sept. 17, argues that AI chatbots replace news destinations rather than send readers to them. To support that, it cites Microsoft data on click-through rates.
- CTR was 87% to 93% lower in Bing Chat than in Bing Web Search for The Times’s websites.
- Daily News plaintiffs’ sites saw 83% to 91% lower CTR.
- Ziff Davis sites saw 51% to 94% lower CTR.
CTR here means clicks on a URL divided by impressions, where impressions are appearances of that URL in a search results page or chatbot response. It does not measure total traffic or visits. The brief does not say when Microsoft collected the data or how many queries it covered.
OpenAI and Microsoft dispute the publishers’ case. Both argue their use of news content is fair use, and both filed their own summary judgment motions on Sept. 4. A Microsoft spokesperson told TheWrap that Copilot is not a substitute for publishers’ journalism.
Citations are not clicks
For marketers and SEO teams, the practical insight is less about copyright law and more about measurement. Being cited and being clicked are different events.
Microsoft’s AI Performance report in Bing Webmaster Tools counts citations. Its own help page says citation metrics differ from traditional metrics that measure rankings, clicks and traffic. When Microsoft added Citation Share in June, it said the metric does not represent traffic share. Google’s generative AI report in Search Console shows impressions, not clicks.
That means a brand can look highly visible inside AI answers while session counts barely move. D2C and B2B teams are already seeing branded or category queries answered directly in generative results. If the answer lands without a click, the old organic funnel breaks before the session starts.
What to do now
Start by splitting AI visibility into two metrics: how often your brand is cited, and how often those citations produce a session.
- Track chat citations separately from clicks and referral traffic.
- Audit which queries surface your brand in AI answers and whether they match high-intent pages.
- Watch the Oct. 23 filings to see whether OpenAI and Microsoft add context for the engineer’s quote or the CTR ranges.
The court schedule set by Judge Sidney H. Stein gives oppositions on Oct. 23, amicus briefs on Oct. 30 and replies on Nov. 20. For now, the safe assumption is that answer-engine visibility is not the same as a click, and your measurement should reflect that.
Source: Search Engine Journal
