I am curious if this will drive them to do more visual heavy formats like images, gifs, and video with AI content.

In many cases for big brands, the click is nice but not needed if you have proper measurement and incrementality experiments running.

People stop searching when they have found what they look for.

I think we need a peer reviewed paper to verify /S

When SEO people began engineering their Google result's page excerpt to cut off one word before the answer, I would deliberately click on a site whose summary contained the answer, just to signal that I preferred that result, even though I didn't need to anymore.

Personally, when Google tries to give me AI results, I close the browser and do something else.

The search results were bad enough, and now it's ai slop. I can just make shit up myself, and save everybody time.

Agreed. Also for an AI answer I use the model of my choice.