AI Overview links have had one job since the feature launched: they point to the pages Google used to build the summary, and they are the only way out of the box and onto a website. A search consultant has now spotted something else sitting at the bottom of those blocks. Some links look exactly like the rest, but they open AI Mode, Google’s conversational interface, instead of opening a site. Nothing has been announced, the behavior shows up for some users and not others, and it is worth knowing about before you draw conclusions from your own traffic.
TL;DR
Some AI Overview links now open AI Mode rather than a web page.
Search consultant Gagan Ghotra documented the behavior on 21 September 2026 with a video and screenshots.
Google has said nothing about it, so treat this as a live test rather than a shipped feature.
Search Console counts your impressions inside these surfaces but reports no clicks, so the effect on visits stays invisible.
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What Gagan Ghotra found among the AI Overview links
On 21 September 2026, search consultant Gagan Ghotra posted a short video and screenshots of an AI Overview carrying links that never leave Google. His description is plain: Google is testing anchor links inside AI Overview answers that take you to AI Mode instead of taking you to a web page. He read it as one more tactic to move people off the usual results page and into AI Mode.
The appearance is the part that matters. These AI Overview links sit among the source links, they carry the same underline, and nothing warns the reader where they lead. On the screenshots, the cursor hovers over two of them, and both fire a follow-up question inside the conversational interface rather than loading a site.
Worth separating the two surfaces here. An AI Overview is the generated summary that appears at the top of a normal results page. AI Mode is a separate space where you keep asking the engine questions, the way you would with an assistant. Both have been live in most markets through 2026. Moving from one to the other means the reader leaves the results page behind.
A test is not a rollout, and that distinction deserves saying out loud. Google runs interface variants on slices of traffic all the time, most of them never ship, and this one came with no announcement at all. Until Google says otherwise, this is one observation on one screen rather than a rule of the engine. The direction of travel is what deserves attention: AI Overview links used to lead out of Google, and some now lead further in.
⚠️ Worth knowing. There is nothing to change on your site because of this test. Where AI Overview links point is decided inside Google, not in your code, and no setting on your end makes a source link win over a conversational one.
Why a link into AI Mode is not a visit
A link that leads back into a Google interface leaves nothing behind on your side. No session, no pageview, no form filled in, nothing in your analytics. The reader carries on searching in a place where your site can be quoted without ever being opened. On a young site counting its first visitors one by one, that difference is the whole story.
Academic work has started putting numbers on what these surfaces do to publisher traffic. Stephanie T. Wang, Jeffrey Gleason, Yakov Bart, Christo Wilson and Danaé Metaxa, from the University of Pennsylvania and Northeastern University, ran a preregistered field experiment with 1,100 participants comparing versions of Google Search, including one with the AI features stripped out and one limited to AI Mode.
Their findings line up with what many site owners report. Removing AI Overviews and AI Mode pushes click-through to publishers up, while an AI Mode only experience pushes it down and erodes both satisfaction and trust in what people found. The authors put the drop in outbound organic clicks at roughly 18.5% across all the searches they observed, including the ones with no AI Overview on screen.
Read that figure as a measurement on one sample over one period, not as a forecast for your site. It still gives you something useful: a question to test against your own numbers, which is exactly how the first click-through readings after an AI Overviews launch were handled, with rankings holding steady while clicks slipped.
This test also lands in a run of similar observations about which AI Overview links these boxes favour. AI Mode was already caught leaning on Google’s own business listings as a top cited source, which raises the same underlying question: how much of what looks like a link out actually leads to an independent site.
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What your own reports can and cannot tell you
Google documents how sites show up in these surfaces. Its documentation on AI features and your website states that no special markup or structured data controls whether you appear in an AI Overview, and that the same practices as ordinary search apply. There is no hidden switch to flip.
On measurement, Search Console opened a generative AI performance report on 31 August 2026 covering AI Overviews and AI Mode. Know what it holds before you go looking for answers in it: impressions, grouped by page, country, device and date. No clicks, no click-through rate, no average position. You can confirm that your site was shown inside these boxes, never that it earned a visit from one.
The standard performance report will not separate them either, since queries coming from the conversational surface arrive mixed in with the rest, the way AI Mode queries land in the performance report with no label of their own. The honest summary: you can measure your presence, not yet its return.
Three moves are worth making this week. Open the generative AI performance report if your property has access to it, write down your current impression volume so you have a baseline, then compare organic clicks against rankings in the standard report each month. A widening gap between steady positions and falling clicks is the signal to watch for.
The fundamentals have not moved with this test. A page sitting behind one of those AI Overview links is a page the engine judged clear, current and worth repeating. AI Overviews reward no technical trick, they lift content that answers a question precisely. That is the ground a small site can still win on, and it deserves more of your time than watching for the next interface variant.
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[…] rollout follows a run of changes already covered here, starting with AI Overview links that now open AI Mode. The surface is turning from a place where you ask a question into a place where you hand over a […]