Google is now automatically expanding its AI search summaries at the top of the results page for some searches, Search Engine Roundtable reported. The change, when it goes into effect, pushes a search’s typical list of links much further down the Google results page; Instead of seeing part of an AI overview with a “Show more” button you can click, Google will show a full AI overview at the top of your search, an “Ask anything” box below it, and then the list of links. It can generate a lot of displacement. It’s unclear exactly what Google’s criteria are for auto-expanding AI overviews. Before writing this story, I was seeing them in most of my test searches. But now, AI overviews typically only show the initial part of the response and the “Show more” button. My most consistent query for auto-expanding AI overview is “what’s the best game on Switch 2?”, but even that hasn’t been consistent across all searches and browsers. “For some queries, AI overviews may dynamically expand for topics where our systems determine it is most useful to people,” Google spokesperson Jennifer Kutz says in a statement to The Verge. “Our research has shown that with this dynamic experience, users find Search more useful and engage more deeply in follow-up exploration.” Kutz also says that “if users have already started scrolling to see the content below the AI overview, we cancel the expansion so that the user does not lose their reading position.”
