Google announced on Thursday that links to sites and articles will become more prominent and will appear higher in search results generated with artificial intelligence (AI). This comes amid alarm from brands and news publishers over a sharp drop in their traffic.
Alphabet, which owns Google, began introducing AI features into search more than two years ago. In May 2024, AI Overviews appeared - brief answers generated by AI instead of the usual list of links. In March 2025, AI Mode was added: it opens in a separate window and gives a more detailed answer and more links than AI Overviews.
Now contextual links will be shown more often and higher in AI answers. In addition, Google will expand worldwide a links "carousel" - a set of cards directly under AI Overviews with headlines and images of relevant articles. The algorithm will give priority to material from sites that the user has previously marked as "preferred sources". Relevant posts from social networks and forums may also appear in the results.
Links at the end of AI summaries will become "more attractive and noticeable" for those who want to "dig deeper".
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, commenting on second-quarter 2025 results, said AI Overviews have more than 2 billion users per month in more than 200 countries.
However, several studies have shown that when traditional search is replaced by AI summaries, the share of users opening the suggested links drops noticeably. According to a report by consulting company Chartbeat, news sites lost 40% of their traffic from Google between July 2025 and July 2026. In August, the French group Apig, which represents daily newspapers, contacted the antitrust authority with a warning that AI summaries violate agreements with news publishers reached in 2022.
Thus, Google is trying to make links in AI search more visible, but it is not yet clear whether this will restore the flow of visitors to sites. This concerns a statistical association between the introduction of AI summaries and the drop in traffic, not a proven cause: studies record a coincidence but do not confirm that AI answers directly caused the outflow.