Google is adding more clickable links to AI answers
Links inside AI answers are getting more common and moving further up the response, according to an October 15 Google announcement.
Google says it is putting more clickable links inside its AI answers, and showing them higher up in the response more often. The announcement came on October 15 and was summarised by Alex Groberman, who says Google described "continued and substantial increases" to the number of inline links it shows.
There is a big difference between being buried in a source panel and being the clickable source directly beside the answer someone is reading.
Inline links are links built into the words and sentences of an AI answer itself, rather than tucked away in a source panel at the side or the bottom. Groberman's point is that the two are not the same thing. Being the clickable source sitting next to the sentence someone is reading is a much shorter path to your website than being one of ten logos in a box.
A new spot at the top for official pages
Google is also testing a section near the top of AI answers that highlights one or two official websites when it thinks those are the best places to finish a task. Think searches like where to renew a passport, how to cancel a subscription, or where to book a service. Plenty of sites talk about those topics, but usually only one place lets you actually do the thing.
That puts weight on your commercial pages. Your booking page, pricing page and service pages should make it obvious what the page does and who it is for.
What else Google said
Two other details from the announcement. Google says AI Overviews and AI Mode are rooted in its core Search ranking and quality systems, so ordinary SEO still applies. Your pages need to be crawlable and indexable, which simply means Google can reach them and store them in its index. Google also says there is no special AI Search schema, meaning no new bit of code, that businesses suddenly need to add.
Google also mentioned that use of Preferred Sources, the feature that lets people tell Google which sites they want to see more of, has grown more than 7x since the start of 2026.
What to do
Pick the page on your site where a customer actually completes something, a booking form, a quote request or a product page. Read the first screen of it. If it does not say plainly what the page is for, who it is for and what happens next, rewrite that part. That is the page Google is trying to surface when someone wants to get the job done rather than read about it.
Be the person who already knew
One email a day. Under three minutes. You will hear about a Google change before it shows up in your traffic.