Matthew Widdop
Matty is a Digital SEO Executive at Intelligency, helping our clients to improve their digital performance. Matty is currently studying for his Level 3 Multi-Channel Marketer apprenticeship and has completed a Sport Journalism Degree at the University of Huddersfield.
Google has announced that citations within AI Overviews and AI Mode will now have new formats and displays which will hopefully boost CTR, making AEO even more crucial for business and their digital presence moving forward. In this article we’ll go through the 5 different ways Google has announced they will display links in 2026.
Further Exploration
Google have introduced a “further exploration” section to AI Overviews that will appear at the bottom of AI responses that encourages further reading on websites that are topical authorities on a specific subject. This is one of the first indications of AI Overviews being used to truly being used to platform links rather than use them subtly like in previous iterations of AI Overviews. Getting into these further exploration links could be crucial for business’ as they are the most clearly displayed links to date yet in AI Overviews and if they appear often, business will be pushing to ramp up their AEO
Subscriptions Links
Subscription linking allows readers who pay to read your content link their subscriptions to their Google account. These subscriptions will then appear in AI Overviews, as seen below, so people can see if information has come from one of their trusted sources, and improving the chances of CTR. This is mainly going to be a good feature for news publications that use subscription models to allow people access to their content.
Community Advice
A lot of people, when searching online, especially when asking question based searches want to seek out advice from others who have shared similar experiences. Attaching “reddit” to the end of searches, is a tactic from users to often seek out advice from others.
Now AI Overviews will include previews from of public perspectives and online discussion from communities for certain, question based searches. These new forms of links will help community based cites and forums get more links in AI overviews.
Expanded Links within Content
AI Overviews already includes links throughout content so you can dig further into research as your reading through AI content. The latest update still allows for seeing links directly where you need them but now these links will just be more prevalent in AI searches.
Website Hover
When you hover over an inline link the website that the information is being pulled from will now appear with their web icon, page and website name attached. Once again this feature is just building out on existing linking features to make websites more obvious in AI Overviews and improve CTR.
A lot of these new features being added into AI Overviews and AI Mode will improve click-through-rate to websites, which means being seen and recognised as a topical authority by Google and appearing in AI Overviews will be more important than ever going forward.
