Some AI answer links now open more AI, not your site

Barry Schwartz reports that some links inside Google's AI Overviews (the AI written summary at the top of search results) now send people into AI Mode, Google's chat style search, instead of out to a web page. He credited the find to @gaganghotra_. Glenn Gabe, reacting to it, called the behaviour "A new form of AI Inception", pointing out the path goes from AI Overviews to AI Mode.

Glenn Gabe

@glenngabe

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A new form of AI Inception

Why a small business owner should care

A link in an AI Overview is one of the few ways that summary can still send you a visitor. If the link opens another Google AI screen rather than your page, the person stays inside Google and you get nothing from that click. Someone researching a plumber, a dentist or a niche product could bounce between two AI answers and never land on a real site.

The important caveat is scale. This is a spotted example, not a measured rollout. The sources do not say how many AI Overviews do this, which countries or query types are affected, or whether Google intends to keep it. Nobody outside Google knows yet, and Google has not commented in these sources.

What to do now

Nothing to change on your site. There is no setting that controls where Google points a link in its own AI summary, and there is no fix to apply for a test that may not stick around.

What is worth doing is watching your own numbers so you notice if this does spread. Open Google Search Console, click Performance, and compare clicks against impressions over the last three months. Impressions holding steady while clicks slide is the pattern to look for, because it means people are seeing you in search and not coming through.

If you want a second read on it, check the same period in your analytics tool for visits that arrive from Google search. That tells you what actually reached your site, rather than what Google showed. Write down today's numbers so you have a baseline to compare against next month.