Google has started opening AI Overviews for definition searches in full, with no 'Show more' click, and is testing moving the source icons from the top of the overview to the bottom. Neither change has been announced.
Dominic Coutts
Both changes put the links further from the reader, so the same AI Overview appearances will earn fewer clicks. Being named inside the answer now counts for more than the link sitting beside it.
What happened
Google has made 2 changes to AI Overviews in as many days, neither of them announced. On 11 November Glenn Gabe found that AI Overviews for definition searches now open in full, with no Show more click needed, which pushes the ordinary web results off the bottom of the screen. On 12 November Brodie Clark of SERP Alert reported Google testing the source icons at the bottom of the AI Overview rather than the top, with the full list of citations appearing on hover. Both were written up by Search Engine Roundtable. Google's only comment on changes of this kind has been that it is always testing and tuning these experiences.
What it means for you
Read this as a direction rather than a measured effect. These are 2 practitioners reporting what they see, the citation move is a test that may never ship, and nobody has published click figures for either change. The direction is the same both times: the answer takes more of the screen, and the links to the sites that supplied it sit further from the reader. If you have pages that explain what something is or what a term means, that is where you will feel it first, as impressions hold and clicks slide.
What to do
- Put the generative AI impressions and the Search clicks for your explainer and definition pages side by side, and watch the gap over the next month.
- Give the answer clearly in the first 2 lines of those pages and name your business in it, because being quoted is the only thing left to win there.
- Change nothing structural on the strength of a test. Check the source icons again in a month and see whether it shipped.
Search Engine Roundtable
Real and worth watching, but nothing to act on yet.
You still rank. But Google's answering for you.
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