On October 15, 2026, Google published a post on its Keyword blog by Hema Budaraju, vice president of product management, describing five changes to the way links appear in AI Mode and AI Overviews. More places for a website to show up. No way to tell whether yours did.
What changed on October 15?
Five things, all of them about link placement.
Google is putting more inline links in AI responses and showing them higher up more often. It is testing a new section at the top of a response that surfaces official pages for a specific task, with a short note on why each link is useful. Article carousels for timely topics are expanding to more locations and languages, and those carousels now highlight a user’s Preferred Sources. The links at the end of some responses are getting image thumbnails and a more clickable design. And in AI Mode video results, creator and publisher names are now clickable — though they lead to a Google Search profile page first, not to the publisher.
Google also said use of Preferred Sources, the setting that lets a searcher name sites they want to see more of, has grown more than sevenfold since the start of the year.
Can you measure whether it worked?
No. Not from Google, and not yet.
Barry Schwartz reported the same day at Search Engine Roundtable that Google has still not added click data to the AI performance report in Search Console. Google told him it is “continuing to work with website owners” on what insights would help, and will add metrics over time. Schwartz’s point is obvious: clicks are the metric publishers need, and they are the metric that is missing.
So the scoreboard is: more link slots, more prominence, and no count of what came through them. Treat any claim about your AI search performance made with confidence this month as a guess.
So how do you appear in AI Overviews?
Be the page that answers one specific question completely, in plain sentences, near the top.
That is not a slogan. Look at what Google says the new top-of-response section does: it surfaces official pages for a particular task. “Official” favors the primary source for its own subject. For an owner-operator, that means the facts about your own business have to exist on your own site, in text, in a form a model can lift: your prices or price ranges, your service area, your hours, your process, your warranty and return terms, your specifications, your lead times, who you do not serve.
Most small-business sites fail this on mechanics, not strategy. The pricing is in a PDF. The hours are in an image. The process is in a video with no transcript. The specifications are behind a form. None of that can be quoted, so none of it gets cited.
Then answer questions as questions. Use the question as a heading and answer it in the first sentence underneath, before the context and the caveats. An answer engine reads the first declarative sentence after a heading and moves on. Burying the answer in paragraph four is how a page that knows the answer loses the citation to a page that does not.
This is the slow part, and it is content work rather than technical work — the writing of pages that say something specific enough to be quoted. Incognito Worldwide builds content for exactly this purpose, starting with a gap analysis, because the usual finding isn’t that the pages are bad, but that customers’ questions have no page at all.
What is worth remembering here?
Google spent October making its AI answers link out more. That is the first move in two years that went in a publisher’s favor. It still has no click data, so you cannot run it on a dashboard. You run it on the assumption that being the clearest answer to a narrow question is durable, and then you check Search Console impressions and your own inquiry volume for confirmation.
The SEO, AEO, and GEO blueprint lays out how search engine optimization, answer engine optimization, and generative engine optimization fit into one plan rather than three budgets.