Google is reworking how its AI answers send people out to the web, and for once the changes point in the direction publishers have been asking for. In an October 15 post, Hema Budaraju, Google’s VP of Product Management for Search, announced that inline links will now appear higher inside AI Overviews and AI Mode responses, and more often, so readers can click out to sources without scrolling to the bottom of an AI answer.
The update has several moving parts. Google is testing a new section at the very top of some responses that highlights one or two official web pages for a task, with a short note on why each link helps. News carousels for timely topics are expanding globally and will surface a reader’s Preferred Sources, a feature Google says has grown sevenfold in use since the start of the year. The “Dive Deeper” links at the end of answers get a more clickable, thumbnail-led design, and publisher and creator names in video results become clickable through to their profiles.
The context matters: independent measurement has publishers reporting steep referral losses since AI answers took over the top of the results, with Chartbeat data showing news traffic from Google down around 40 percent between July 2025 and July 2026. Google says more than 400 publications are now in its News AI pilot licensing programme. Whether higher links translate into recovered clicks is the number the whole industry will be watching this quarter.
Source: BetaNews
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