Link Building Strategies

Google is testing using inline, hover-style links for citations in the AI Mode results. When you hover your mouse cursor over the link card, it will hover the link card sources over the answer. View the full article

Google is testing moving your query from the left top position to the right top position of the AI response within AI Mode. This is a subtle change but it is interesting to see Google test these small changes to AI Mode.View the full article

Google is testing adding price labels on top of the product images within AI Mode results. I tried to replicate this but I was not able to, so it seems like a test. View the full article

Google is testing integrating Search Live (Gemini Live - voice search as you talk) in AI Mode. Plus, this version shows citation cards as part of the answer, as you are having a conversational search with AI Mode.View the full article

Google is testing the ability to highlight portions of the response, to do a follow-up question on what you highlighted. It is similar to past tests on the AI Overview, but this is within AI Mode.View the full article

Google released AI Mode in the U.S. a couple of days ago and Tom Critchlow and Patrick Stox noticed that Google prevented you from tracking referrer data from AI Mode. Well, that turned out to be unintentional and Google said it is a bug and it will be fixed.View the full article

Google AI Mode has had travel planning for some time but according to some in the travel industry, Google recently began rolling out more of these features in the wild. These include dynamic day-by-day trip plans, hotel add-ons, tickets, and dining stitched into a single AI conversation.View the full article

Google is testing another variation of the AI-generated product summaries in Google AI Mode, this one is named "What to know." It is made up of user reviews and web sources, according to the disclaimer.View the full article

Google is now showing directly hotel booking links directly inside the AI-generated responses within AI Mode. This can lead to sending hotels direct traffic in the AI response, which seems like a win to me. View the full article

Google announced that AI Mode had been updated to handle and respond more visually. So AI Mode responses both understand your queries in a more visual way and respond with more visual responses. Google said the responses aim at sparking inspiration, amongst other things.View the full article

Google has added 53 new languages to AI Mode, which means the AI Mode works in just under 100 languages. This was announced by Nick Fox from Google on X yesterday.View the full article

Google is testing having the AI Overview box "Ask Anything" section stick to the bottom of the Google Search box as you scroll down the AI Overview and the search results. This keeps AI Mode in your face during the whole search experience. View the full article

Over the past few weeks, Google has been showing AI Overviews for local packs, leading some businesses to see huge drops in visibility for their Google Business Profile and local listings. Some businesses are seeing 50% declines or more because of the local pack change.View the full article

Google confirmed there is a bug with AI Overviews not showing links for some responses. The bug was spotted by Lily Ray, who posted some examples several hours ago. Rajan Patel, Google's VP, Engineering for Search, replied saying it is a bug and Google is working on fixing it.View the full article

Surprise, surprise, as I called it, Google is expanding AI Overviews into more regions. I mean, we saw this being leaked a couple of weeks ago, so it is not shocking news. But at I/O, Google said AI Overviews are "now available in more than 200 countries and territories and in more than 40 languages, with support added for Arabic, Chinese, Malay, Urdu and more."View the full article

Google seems to be rolling out a new format for some of the AI Overviews it shows within search. This format shows a drop-down, expandable, accordion-style interface that you can expand to show more.View the full article

In early December, Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, said Google is starting to test powering AI Overviews with Gemini 2.0. Well, we may be starting to see some of that in the wild, with much deeper and detailed AI Overviews and citations.View the full article

Did you know that the Google AI Overviews link citation paperclip icons are blue before you click to see more of the overviews and then after you click on them, that icon turns to a gray color.View the full article

Google announced a number of features across Google Search, Maps, Lens and other areas around travel and vacation planning. Some of the features were already out there but let's recap some of the more interesting features.View the full article

Google has clearly documented how it tracks link clicks, impressions and positions for AI Overviews in this help document. But if you ever saw an AI Overview and interacted with them, you'd know that (1) when you click on a link icon, the citation cards on the right change and (2) running the same query a minute later may return different citation cards.View the full article

As you know, Google is okay with linking its AI Overviews back to more Google Search results. But is Google okay with linking the same query, to the same query, over and over again, through the AI Overviews?View the full article

In April, we saw a small disclaimer on the Google AI Overviews within Google Search to "Check important info." Well, Google is testing a much larger disclaimer, at the bottom of the AI Overview that says, "Double-check important information" and "It's a good idea to check info in multiple places" with a "Learn more" button.View the full article

Google AI Overviews, even when not signed into a Google Labs project, is providing coding and programming examples and help. This started sometime yesterday, I believe, and before, I believe you had to opt into a Search Labs experiment to trigger this.View the full article

Google announced late on Friday that Gemini 3 Pro is now powered Google AI Overviews for complex queries. Google actually said this last November, but then edited its story to say it was just AI Mode that was powered by Gemini 3 Pro and not AI Overviews. Now both AI Overviews and AI Mode can use Gemini 3 Pro.View the full article

Google has updated how it shows events within AI Overviews. It can now show the direct display of events, instead of an event summary. It is also a bit buggy, but here is how it looks.View the full article