Google has announced a set of changes to how links appear inside AI Overviews and AI Mode. According to its announcement, inline links will be shown higher within AI-generated answers, the links at the end of an answer will be more clickable, timely-news carousels are being expanded, and Google is testing a prominent section that features one or two official websites. Google's own post, "AI Overviews and AI Mode get more links and better ways to explore", sets out the details.
This matters more than another GEO tooling launch because it changes the distribution mechanism itself. Whether an AI-generated answer sends anyone to a publisher or brand depends on where and how links are presented. Google is evidently responding to growing concern that AI search erodes outbound clicks. One preregistered experiment with around 1,100 U.S. users reportedly found that forcing AI Mode reduced publisher click-through by 18.8 percentage points, a figure reported by Let's Data Science. We'd treat that number as one study's finding rather than a settled benchmark, but the direction of travel is clear.
What this means for getting cited by AI: the practical takeaway is that citation is becoming more visible and more valuable, so it's worth making your pages easy to attribute. Pages with clear, self-contained claims, named authorship, specific data and unambiguous entity signals (who you are, what you publish, why you're the authority) are the ones most likely to be surfaced as sources. The official-websites test also suggests Google is thinking about how to highlight primary sources, which rewards brands that publish authoritative material about themselves and their subject rather than relying on third-party mentions alone.
We'd suggest checking now whether your key pages are actually being cited in AI answers, and for which queries. That's exactly what a Citeify audit measures, so if you're unsure where you stand, it's a sensible place to start.