Google Pushes Links Even Lower: AI Overviews Now Expand on Their Own

Google keeps reshaping the look of its search results in favor of artificial intelligence. As the publication Search Engine Roundtable noticed, for some queries the AI summaries at the top of the page now expand automatically — without a click on the “Show more” button.

Previously a user would see only the beginning of an AI Overview along with an expand button, and beneath it the familiar list of sites. Now, however, a full AI summary can appear at the top right away, with an “Ask anything” field below it, and only then the links. In practice this means one thing: to reach the ordinary results, you have to scroll a long way down the page.

When exactly it kicks in

Just what criteria Google uses to decide to expand a summary in full is not entirely clear from the company's explanations. The author of the article in The Verge notes that at first he saw the auto-expansion on almost all of his test queries, and then it stopped happening — and the AI Overview again showed only the start of the answer with a button. The most reliable way to trigger the effect turned out to be the query “what is the best game on switch 2,” but even it behaved inconsistently across different browsers and sessions.

Google spokesperson Jennifer Kutz explained that for certain queries AI Overviews “can dynamically expand for topics where our systems determine it's most helpful.” According to her, the company's research showed that with this behavior users find search more useful and engage more deeply in exploring the topic further. Kutz added that if a person has already started scrolling the page toward the material below the AI summary, the auto-expansion is canceled so as not to knock them off their place in the reading.

Behind the smooth wording lies an obvious trend: the space that has historically been occupied by links to source sites is being handed over ever more actively to Google's own generative answers. For those who were looking for precisely a list of sources, the usefulness of such an “improvement” remains debatable.

Source: The Verge