A month ago, we reported that Google was testing linking words in the AI Overviews back to its own search results. We felt this set a horrible message but hey, Google did not, instead, Google made it an official feature of AI Overviews because it helps "people more easily explore topics and discover relevant websites," the company told me.
A Google spokesperson sent me the following statement yesterday afternoon:
"To help people more easily explore topics and discover relevant websites, we've added links to some terms within AI Overviews when our systems determine it might be useful. Similar to our long-standing “People also search for” feature, our testing shows that people find this helpful. AI Overviews continue to have prominent links out to the web, which we're also expanding."
So Google says (1) this is helpful to searchers and (2) it has been a long standing feature in the people also search for search feature and (3) its testing showed people find it helpful. Google also did say they are "expanding" links out to the web with this release but I am not sure how exactly...
Lily Ray just shared an example of this on X where Google had 31 links in the AI Overview response back to its own search results:
Google also started to do this within the things to do and people also ask results.
Google told me that this feature is available in English in the US, on both mobile and desktop.
With AI Overviews, Google has seen that people often end up manually searching for certain terms as a separate query. When Google offers features that reduce manual refinements, i.e. having to manually rewrite a query, Google said it findd that people have a much better search experience. So that is why Google is adding these links.
Google added that its systems prioritize linking to third party websites within the AI Overview response when Google has high confidence that those websites will help the user find the information they’re seeking.
In my opinion, and I can be totally wrong here, Google still can't find a great way to monetize these AI Overviews. So what they do is send searchers to additional search result pages that are less likely to have AI Overviews but more likely to have tons of search ads on them, with the goal to have searchers click on those ads. Again, I can be wrong.
Google has to keep showing their search volume is up and at the same time tout how they prioritize publishers traffic.
I am not a fan of this - as you can tell....
Oh, and Microsoft Bing just started to do the same.
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