Google is changing AI overviews in search results that rob sites of traffic

Google search has changed dramatically after AI overviews took over. | Image by Google

AI overviews in Google searches have been a very controversial addition despite being quite convenient, even if they are oftentimes blatantly inaccurate. Google has apparently decided to implement a minor fix for one of the biggest complaints about these overviews: the decreased flow of traffic towards the sites that the AI scrapes its answers from.

AI overviews, what’s changing?

If we’re being completely honest, the change isn’t as major as owners of affected websites might have liked. AI overviews will still scrape data directly from sites that have the answer for your Google search and will continue to present it directly under the search box.

Sites will not be getting any additional traffic somehow either, and the AI answers have not been restricted in a way to encourage users to visit the linked sources. All that is really changing is that now, if you hover over the small bubble denoting the sources that the answer has been pulled from, the websites that were scraped will show up in a pop-up.



Robby Stein — Vice President of Product for Google Search — detailed the changes in a new post on social media. Stein explained that, in addition to the new pop-up, the AI-generated answers will also feature links to the sources a bit more prominently than before.

The new pop-up, as pointed out by a comment below the post, is similar to how the Copilot search approaches AI overviews.

Not a lot to celebrate

These changes, as mentioned before, are not going to help websites directly. If users don’t click on the source links in the new pop-up or the more prominent anchor text segments, then these websites will still be losing out on organic traffic.

It’s a step in the right direction perhaps, but most websites aren’t going to see an increase in traffic if I had to guess. This change is now live on Google search and you can see it in action right now. All you have to do is search for something.

One small step for man?

Is this a giant leap for AI disguised as a small step for man? Well, it’s not really helping AI become more popular, but it’s not helping websites in any meaningful way either, in my opinion.

I don’t really understand what the point of the new pop-up is when the source websites are already being displayed on one side. It might be a bit helpful if the AI answer is very long and you’ve scrolled down a fair bit, but I’m still doubtful of how much this is actually going to benefit the sites that the AI scraped.

Robby Stein claims that Google’s testing has found this new UI layout to be more engaging. I suppose we’ll know for certain in a couple of months.

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