Google outlined five changes to AI Mode and AI Overviews on 15 October, all aimed at sending readers to websites. The company said it has made continued and substantial increases to the number of inline links inside AI answers and will show them higher up in responses more often. It is testing a dedicated section at the top of a response that surfaces one or two official pages with a note on why each is useful. Carousels of timely articles, already used in some AI Search features, are rolling out to more locations and languages and will highlight a user's Preferred Sources. Links to related articles at the end of responses get image thumbnails and a more clickable design, and Google has begun testing clickable creator and publisher names on video results that open a Search profile. Google said use of its Preferred Sources feature has grown more than sevenfold since the start of the year.
Our takeOur take: Five interface changes, one measurable claim — Preferred Sources usage up more than sevenfold since January — and no figure for the outcome the post is about: whether clicks to publishers recover. Placement is the technical content here: inline citations sit inside the generated answer, the official-pages block sits above it, carousels push related links below, so each change moves the reader at a different point in the reading path. Without per-surface click data the design can be described but not evaluated. That is the number worth asking for next.