Overview
- On Thursday, Google began rolling out and testing multiple UI changes that place inline source links higher in AI-generated answers and redesign end-of-response “Dive Deeper” links with image thumbnails to make them more clickable.
- Google is expanding visual carousels for timely articles to more countries and languages and is surfacing articles from users’ Preferred Sources, a setting the company says has grown more than sevenfold this year.
- The company is testing a top-of-response slot that will show one or two official webpages for task-specific queries with short explanations of why those links matter and it has started trials for clickable creator and publisher names that link to Search profiles in AI Mode.
- Publishers have reported large referral losses since Google introduced AI summaries, with a Chartbeat analysis showing roughly a 40% drop in Google-driven traffic from July 2025 to July 2026, and Google’s announced changes do not yet include public metrics proving traffic recovery.
- Google also runs a News AI licensing pilot with more than 400 participating publishers as a commercial response to content use, but the company is still deploying updates incrementally and the real effect on clicks, revenue, and regulator scrutiny remains uncertain.