Google auto-expands AI Overviews in Search, pushing links further down the page

Google is auto-expanding AI answers in Search

Google has started automatically expanding the AI-generated summaries that appear at the top of many search results pages. According to The Verge, which points to an earlier sighting by Search Engine Roundtable, the change means some searches now present the complete AI answer immediately, leaving the standard list of links far lower on the page and often requiring plenty of scrolling to reach.

How the results page changes

Previously, when Google displayed an AI Overview it typically showed only the opening portion of the summary, followed by a "Show more" button that users had to click. With the new behaviour, the overview arrives already expanded. Below the full summary sits an "Ask anything" box for follow-up questions, and only after that does the familiar list of links appear. The result is a results page increasingly dominated by Google's own generated content.

The trigger is unclear

What prompts the expansion is not obvious, and Google has not published its criteria. The Verge's reporter found the behaviour erratic: at one point most test searches produced the expanded version, but shortly afterwards most searches were back to the collapsed summary with the "Show more" button. One query — "what is the best game on switch 2" — triggered the expansion most reliably, though even that varied between searches and browsers. The inconsistency suggests the feature is either rolling out gradually or depends on signals Google has chosen not to disclose.

What Google says

In a statement to The Verge, Google spokesperson Jennifer Kutz said that for some queries, AI Overviews "may dynamically expand for topics where our systems determine it's most useful for people." She added that Google's research indicates users find Search more helpful with this dynamic experience and go deeper into follow-up exploration.

Kutz also described one safeguard: if a user has already started scrolling toward the content beneath the AI Overview, Google cancels the expansion so the person's reading position is not disturbed. In other words, the auto-expansion is designed to happen before you commit to scrolling, not after.

Why it matters

Google Search remains the primary gateway to the web, and layout decisions at the top of the results page shape where attention and clicks go. Automatically expanding AI Overviews takes space that once went to links — publishers, retailers, documentation, forums — and hands it to Google's own generated answer, raising the odds that a query is resolved without a click ever leaving Search.

The "Ask anything" box placed between the summary and the links reinforces that dynamic, steering users toward a follow-up conversation inside Google rather than a visit to the source material. For sites that depend on search traffic, the change is likely to sharpen worries about shrinking referral visits, and the unpredictable triggering makes the real impact difficult to measure: the same query can render differently from one attempt to the next.

The scroll-cancellation behaviour shows Google is conscious of at least some of the user-experience trade-offs. But the direction of travel is clear — the list of links, once the entire point of a results page, is steadily becoming the thing you scroll past.