Run a search on your phone today and there is a growing chance you will not see a single blue link without scrolling. Google has confirmed that AI Overviews now expand into a full AI Mode answer by default on some queries, with the follow-up “Ask anything” box already open, pushing the ten organic results well below the fold.
Until now, AI Overviews loaded as a short snippet with a “Show more” button underneath. Tapping it was a choice. That step is gone for the queries affected: the long-form answer loads immediately, the conversational prompt box sits under it, and the links Google used to lead with start further down the page than most people scroll on a 6-inch screen.
What Google says about the AI Overviews change
A Google spokesperson gave the following statement to Search Engine Roundtable, which first got the company on record about the behaviour:
“For some queries, AI Overviews may dynamically expand for topics where our systems determine it’s most useful for people. Our research has shown that with this dynamic experience, users find Search more helpful and engage deeper in follow-up exploration.”
Robby Stein, who leads product for Google Search’s AI efforts, added on X that the expansion is limited to topics Google’s systems judge useful, and that if you have already started scrolling, the expansion stops so your reading position is not shifted underneath you. He also described the experience as still being tested and tuned, which is worth holding onto: this is not a finished, universally rolled-out interface.
What actually changes on your phone
The practical difference is screen real estate, and on a phone that is the whole ballgame. A dynamically expanded AI Overview plus an open prompt box can occupy the entire first viewport. The sources Google draws from are still there, but they are now a scroll or a tap away rather than sitting in front of you, and the same is true of the sites you might have gone to directly.
That matters more than it sounds. An AI summary is a confident-sounding single answer with no visible disagreement in it. When ten competing links were the default, comparing sources was the path of least resistance. Now the path of least resistance is to accept the summary and type a follow-up question into the box Google has helpfully left open — which keeps you inside Google rather than sending you anywhere. It is the same direction of travel as Google’s other recent search changes, including the shift in how it polices site-reputation abuse in Europe. For a straightforward factual lookup that is genuinely faster. For anything where accuracy matters, where a product recommendation could cost you money, or where you want to know who is making the claim, the extra scroll is worth doing.
How to get to the links faster
There is no toggle to switch the expanded view off. A few things do help in the meantime:
- Use the Web filter. On a results page, swipe along the row of filter chips under the search box until you find Web. It strips the page back to plain text links, with no AI answer, images or video modules.
- Check the sources on the answer. The link icons attached to an AI Overview are the fastest route to the pages the summary was built from.
- Expect it to be inconsistent. Google says only some queries trigger this, and the behaviour is still being tuned, so the same search may look different tomorrow.
The change was first spotted publicly by SEO consultant Chris Long, who posted an example on X on 27 August. Google has not announced it as a formal launch, and as of 31 August the spokesperson statement above remains the only first-party confirmation that the behaviour is deliberate.
Source: Chris Long (@chris_nectiv) on X, via Search Engine Roundtable
