On October 15, 2026, Google announced five changes to AI Mode and AI Overviews. Inline links in the text of responses will appear near the top more often, a section for one or two official sites is being tested at the top of responses for tasks that can only be done in one place on the web, and carousels of timely articles are coming to more countries and languages. To be one of those links, Google asks for nothing beyond standard SEO best practices. Search Console counts clicks from these responses along with the rest of your Web traffic, with no way to isolate them.
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Hema Budaraju, VP of Product Management at Google, published a post on The Keyword on October 15, 2026 about links in AI Mode and AI Overviews.1 It announces five changes, two of them still in testing, and says the number of people using the Preferred Sources feature has grown by more than 7x since the start of the year.1 This article covers what Google announced, what a page needs to be one of those links, and what Search Console can measure.
01Five changes announced on October 15
All five updates concern where links appear in Google's AI-generated responses and how they look.1 Search Engine Journal points out that the official-sites section and the creator profile links are tests with no announced expansion date, while the carousel expansion is starting now.2
Inline links near the top of responses more often
Google calls inline links the links embedded in words or phrases in the text of an AI response. It says it has made continued and substantial increases to their presence and is rolling out updates to show them higher up in responses more frequently.1
Search Engine Journal notes that the post doesn't quantify the size of that increase.2 The Verge gives the context: these responses replace the traditional list of links, and there are concerns that the format reduces traffic to publishers.3
A section for one or two official sites, in testing
For some tasks, there are only one or two official places on the web to get them done or find the exact information. Google will test a display that puts those links in a dedicated section at the top of a response, with context on why each link is useful.1
Google presents it as an extension of what it already does when someone is looking to go to a particular site.1 The example image released with the announcement, shown by The Verge, is a query about an airline refund.3
News carousels in more countries and languages
The carousels of timely articles that AI features show on developing topics are starting to roll out to more locations and languages. They highlight the user's Preferred Sources, and Google says they make timely articles visible on a wider range of queries.1 Search Engine Journal notes that the post doesn't name the countries and languages involved.2
Thumbnails on end-of-response links, and creator profiles
The links shown at the end of some responses, to articles that dig into other angles of the topic, are getting image thumbnails and a more clickable design.12 Google also started testing this week, in AI Mode, clickable creator and publisher names on video results that lead to their Search profiles.1
According to Google's help page as cited by Search Engine Journal, these profiles are available in the US, Canada and India to creators with at least 10,000 followers on YouTube, Instagram, X or TikTok.2
02Becoming one of the chosen links
Google's documentation on AI features applies to every link in AI Mode and AI Overviews: SEO best practices still apply, and there are no additional requirements or special optimizations needed to appear there.4
The technical requirements
To appear as a supporting link in an AI Overview or in AI Mode, a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet. A page that meets every requirement still isn't guaranteed to be crawled, indexed or served.4
Google's list of best practices includes content that is easy to find through internal links and structured data that matches the visible text.4 The first point comes down to finding orphan pages that receive no links, the second to the markup mistakes to avoid, including content readers can't see. Google adds that no AI text files or special schema.org markup are needed.4
A business's own task pages
The section in testing targets tasks that can only be done in one or two official places on the web.1 For a business, its own tasks fall into that category: booking an appointment, tracking an order or requesting a quote only happens on its website.
If the test expands, those are the pages the section could suggest for queries about the business. They then need to meet Google's general requirements: be indexed and eligible to be shown with a snippet.4
Preferred Sources
The Preferred Sources feature lets users pick the sites they want to see more of. In AI Mode and AI Overviews, content from a selected site can carry a "Preferred" badge for that user.5 Only domain-level and subdomain-level sites are eligible, and the site must stay included in generative AI features through the corresponding Search Console setting.5
To check whether a site is offered, type it into Google's source preferences tool. Google provides a button that takes two lines of code, or a deep link for sites that can't add JavaScript, to invite readers to choose the site. These methods aren't required to appear as a preferred source.5
03Measuring the effect in Search Console
Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable asked Google for click data on AI responses. Google answered that it is working with website owners to understand which insights will be most helpful and will introduce additional metrics over time.6
What the reports count
The generative AI performance report counts impressions, meaning the number of times a user saw links to the site in a generative AI feature in Google Search.7 Clicks are recorded: a click on an external link in an AI Overview or in AI Mode counts as a click in the performance report, where it is mixed with the rest of the Web search traffic.84
The position of a link that moves up
An AI Overview occupies a single position in search results, and all of its links are assigned that same position.8 Search Engine Journal concludes that an inline link moving up in the response does not, on its own, change its reported position.2 In AI Mode, position follows the same method as a standard results page, and a follow-up question counts as a new query.8
Comparing the two reports
Without isolated clicks, measurement means matching the pages that gain AI impressions with their clicks in the performance report, over two comparable periods. The method that combines the generative AI report and the Performance report is laid out page by page in another article.
Google also says that clicks from search results pages with AI Overviews are higher quality, with users more likely to spend more time on the site, and suggests tracking conversions and time on site in tools such as Google Analytics.4