I think that this

So what’s going on? With AI Overviews, people are searching more and asking new questions that are often longer and more complex. In addition, with AI Overviews people are seeing more links on the page than before. More queries and more links mean more opportunities for websites to surface and get clicked. For some questions where people are looking for a quick answer, like “when is the next full moon,” people may be satisfied with the initial response and not click further. This has also been true for other answer features we’ve added, like the Knowledge Graph or sports scores. But for many other types of questions, people continue to click through, as they want to dig deeper into a topic, explore further or make a purchase. This is why we see click quality increasing — an AI response might provide the lay of the land, but people click to dive deeper and learn more, and when they do, these clicks are more valuable.

is a nice way of selling advertisers more expensive impressions because the "clicks are higher quality now".

I'd pose that this is because 90% of internet users doesn't verify anything and simply believes that what the internet says is true, just like they believe that what the news anchor says is true.