Robby Stein, VP of Product at Google Search, announced this week that AI Overviews and AI Mode are getting a new link experience. Links will become more visible via hover pop-ups on desktop and more prominent link icons on both desktop and mobile.
Good news for website owners - but there is a nuance worth understanding properly.
What is changing?
1. Hover pop-ups with sources on desktop
When users on desktop hover over a passage in an AI Overview, a pop-up appears showing a group of relevant sources. That pop-up displays the site name, favicon, and a short description of the source, so users can see where an answer comes from without having to click immediately.
2. More prominent link icons on desktop and mobile
Alongside the hover feature, link icons within AI answers are becoming larger and more descriptive, on both desktop and mobile. The aim is for users to more clearly see that clickable sources are present, rather than them getting lost in the text.
Stein described the new UI as “more engaging, making it easier to get to great content across the web.” Whether this also leads to measurably more clicks to publishers is something the industry will be monitoring over the coming months.
Why is Google doing this?
Google is responding to a problem that has dominated conversations in the SEO world for the past year: links in AI answers are barely clicked.
Research by Pew Research showed that users clicked on a link in an AI Overview in just 1% of visits to pages with such an overview. An analysis by GrowthSRC Media showed that the click-through rate of the first organic position dropped from 28% to 19% after the rollout of AI Overviews - a decline of 32%.
Google has tried to address this before. In August 2025 Stein announced that more inline links was the “north star” for the product team, and the platform launched embedded link carousels on desktop. The February 2026 announcement is the next step in that same direction, now specifically targeting AI Overviews.
What does this mean for your website?
The hover pop-ups and larger link icons are positive. But clicks are no longer the only measure of visibility in the AI era. Fewer clicks from AI answers is a structural shift in how people find information - not a temporary problem that Google fixes with a UI update.
Because the visitors who do click through from AI answers turn out to be valuable. Research by Seer Interactive shows that visitors via ChatGPT convert at 15.9% versus 1.76% via Google organic. Ahrefs reported that AI visitors made up 0.5% of their traffic but accounted for 12.1% of all signups. These are not casual visitors, but people already convinced by the AI answer who click through to your website specifically for more.
Beyond that, visibility in AI answers counts even without a click. Seer and Semrush found that websites cited in AI Overviews get 35% more organic clicks on the same searches than websites that are not cited. Being cited builds trust and brand reputation - even among users who do not click through.
The question therefore is not how to get more clicks out of AI Overviews, but how to ensure your brand becomes the source that AI systems cite. That is precisely what GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is about: being visible in the answers that AI platforms give, to the questions your target audience is asking.
Want to know how your website currently stands in AI answers, or want a strategy that connects to this shift? Get in touch with us - we are happy to take a look together.