Google's AI Overviews Are Now Full Of More Links, But Not To Websites

Google’s AI Overviews have taken over the experience of Search in many ways, and now Google is looking to expand the prominence of links in these summaries, but those links aren’t going to other websites.

Over the past few weeks, some users have noticed that AI Overviews in Google Search have added more links – in some cases a lot of extra links – on words in the AI-generated summary. However, opening those links just pushes users over to another Google Search page on that topic rather than a website or other resource on the topic.

As it turns out, this is an intentional change on Google’s part that we’ll be seeing more of.

Speaking to Search Engine Land, Google says that links to other Search pages will be added to AI Overviews “when our systems determine it might be useful.”

To help people more easily explore topics and discover relevant websites, we’ve added links to some terms within AI Overviews when our systems determine it might be useful. Similar to our long-standing “People also search for” feature, our testing shows that people find this helpful. AI Overviews continue to have prominent links out to the web, which we’re also expanding.

While Google was it is “expanding” links to the web in AI Overviews, this new behavior has already been caught showing a lot of links back to Google’s own pages. One example found a whopping 31 links within a relatively brief AI Overview, as pictured below. That’s compared to 7 links in the same Overview that go out to the rest of the web, with those links also not being as prominent to the eye.

Another example shows these links on top of product names while looking for the “best” example of a specific product.

There’s almost certainly an impact to the broader web due to this sort of behavior, but the convenience factor to users can’t go unstated, as this definitely would make research on a topic much faster.

What do you think of this change?