Google AI Overviews Get Higher Inline Links, but No Click Data

What Google changed

On October 15, Google announced changes that put more links to websites inside AI Mode and AI Overviews, its two AI answer formats in Search. The company presented the update as a fix for one of the most common complaints about AI search. There are five changes. Inline links, meaning the clickable words and phrases inside an AI answer, will appear higher in responses more often. Google is testing a block at the top of some answers that points to one or two official pages. News carousels are expanding to more countries and languages. The "Dive Deeper" links at the end of answers are being redesigned with thumbnails. And Google is testing clickable creator and publisher names on video results in AI Mode.2324

Hema Budaraju, Google's vice president of product management, announced the changes in a blog post. She said the goal is to make browsing the web from Search simpler, more visual and more engaging.21 Nick Fox, Google's senior vice president of Knowledge and Information, promoted the update on X as a way to help people find links to click and dig deeper.21

For anyone tracking AI search engines, the change is real. The bigger question is whether it shifts the traffic picture for publishers, and Google has not offered evidence that it does.

How the new features work

The inline-link change will reach the most users because it can apply to almost any query. Google says it has already made "continued and substantial increases" in how often inline links appear. It now wants key sources to be clickable at the point where a reader is likely to want them.2123 Search Engine Journal noted that the post does not say how big that increase has been.23

The official-pages test is narrower but could matter more for the queries it covers. When only one or two sites can complete a task, Google would list those pages at the top of the answer, each with a short note on why it is useful. Google's example is an airline refund request.2324 Google described this as an extension of something Search already does: putting a destination in plain view when someone is clearly trying to reach a specific site.21

News publishers will feel the carousel expansion most directly. The carousels for timely topics were announced in May and are now rolling out to more locations and languages. They also highlight a user's Preferred Sources, the outlets that person has chosen to see more often.2429 Google says use of Preferred Sources has grown more than sevenfold since the start of 2026.26 Google did not give a starting number or the share of users who use the feature, so the figure shows growth but not reach.30

The video test is less generous than it sounds. Tapping a creator's or publisher's name opens that person's or outlet's Search profile, a page hosted by Google, rather than their own website.2122 One agency described this as good for discovery but a dead end for traffic.27

Google made a similar round of changes in May. That update added more inline links, desktop hover previews, labels for news subscriptions, suggested next steps and creator attribution for social content.22 The October update continues the same strategy rather than changing direction.

The missing number

Coverage of the announcement largely agrees on one point: Google is still not sharing click data. Search Console's generative AI performance reports, launched June 3, 2026, count impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode but not clicks.21 When asked about the gap, Google said it is still talking with site owners about which insights would help most and that it plans to add more metrics over time. It gave no date and did not commit to click data.2122 Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable has called clicks the most important metric for publishers and has publicly pushed Google to report them.2227

The lack of data also affects how sites can measure this update. Search Console gives every link in an AI Overview the same single position. That means moving an inline link higher in the answer will not change its reported position.23 Publishers have no direct way to tell whether a higher link earned them anything.

The coverage differs on how hopeful to be. Some outlets framed the update as something that could send more traffic to websites.22 Others were more doubtful: ContentGrip noted that Google has not shown the changes will increase referral traffic,28 and Android Authority questioned whether more links and carousels can make up for the traffic publishers have lost since AI Overviews launched.29 The skeptics have the stronger case. Google has the click data, and it would have every reason to publish it if the numbers looked good.

What AI Overviews have done to publisher traffic

The context explains the doubt. A Pew Research Center study of real searches found that users clicked a traditional result 8% of the time when an AI summary appeared, compared with 15% when none appeared. Clicks on links inside the summary itself happened in only about 1% of cases.13 Ahrefs found that AI Overviews were linked to a 58% lower click-through rate for top-ranking pages, up from 34.5% in its April 2025 analysis.12 Chartbeat data cited by the Reuters Institute showed organic search traffic to publishers falling 38% in the US, and about a third globally, between November 2024 and November 2025.1420 Smaller publishers were hit hardest: search referrals fell 60% for small sites, compared with 22% for large ones.14

These studies use different methods, and the headline numbers are often misused. The 58% Ahrefs figure measures click-through rates for top-ranking pages on queries that trigger an AI Overview. It is not an average traffic loss across all sites.16 Still, every study points the same way.

The research most relevant to this update comes from an experimental study summarized by Digital Content Next in September. When an AI Overview appeared, users made 39.8% fewer outbound organic clicks. Of the clicks that remained, only 7.1% came from links inside the AI answer. The rest went to ordinary organic results.19 Users also reported no improvement in satisfaction or search quality when an AI Overview was shown.19 If links inside AI answers recover that little traffic, moving them up within the answer is fine-tuning a small share of a shrinking total.

The pressure on Google goes beyond complaints. Penske Media has filed an antitrust suit, and the European Publishers Council has complained to the European Commission.12 Google also runs a News AI licensing pilot with more than 400 publications that pays for enhanced content used in its AI features.22 Read together, the link updates look partly like product improvement and partly like a response to that legal and political pressure.

What this means for answer engine optimization

For marketers practicing answer engine optimization (AEO), the update makes being cited inside AI answers more valuable. AEO guides already describe the goal as getting cited in AI-generated answers rather than simply ranking.14 They also stress that traditional SEO still matters. One analysis found that 99% of URLs cited in AI Overviews come from pages already ranking in the organic top 10.2

The official-pages test rewards sites with clear, specific task pages. Agencies are already telling clients to make sure their pricing, support and service pages are easy for Google to identify as the official answer.27 The carousel expansion makes Preferred Sources more valuable, since a publisher readers have chosen will show up in more AI answers. To qualify, a site must be included in the generative AI features in Search Console.23

Claims about what citations are worth conflict. Some vendors say brands cited in AI Overviews get noticeably more organic clicks.15 The Digital Content Next experiment suggests links inside AI answers bring back only a small share of lost traffic.19 Until Google publishes click data, publishers should track referrals and engaged visits from AI search to their own pages rather than treat visibility in an answer as a traffic win.28

Our reading

This is a meaningful design change, but nothing has been proven yet. Google is giving the web more space inside its AI answers, and links placed earlier in an answer are more likely to be seen. But Google still decides which sources appear, where they appear and which users see them.30 One of the new features sends clicks to Google's own profile pages instead of publishers' sites.21 The strongest independent evidence suggests links inside AI answers are a weak substitute for the clicks AI Overviews have taken away.19

The real test is click data. If Google adds clicks to its Search Console AI reports, publishers can judge for themselves whether higher links lead to more visits. Until then, the update gives publishers more visibility in AI answers with no way to measure what that visibility is worth.