Google’s AI-generated search summaries change how they show their sources

As Google brings AI Overviews to six new countries, it’s also changing the way the generated summaries display citations. Instead of putting relevant webpages directly in the AI-generated summary, Google is adding a new display to the right of the response that shows cited webpages more prominently.

This new format is rolling out today, and it will also show up on mobile when you select the site icons that appear in the top-right corner of the AI Overview. “We are using the right-hand-side space to prominently display the links to the AI Overview so that people can navigate to the content that they’re interested in,” Hema Budaraju, Google’s senior director of product management for Search, tells The Verge. Google will continue to display regular search results beneath the AI Overview.

Google is also experimenting with attaching links to the text of AI Overviews. You can click the linked text to navigate to relevant websites, as well as browse through the webpages that Google will surface in the new right-side display. So far, Google says early testing has shown “positive” results that have helped drive “higher traffic to publisher sites.”

Other features Google is bringing to AI Overviews in Search Lab include the ability to save an AI Overview, allowing you to revisit the summary when you conduct the same search. Google will also store saved AI Overviews on your Interests page.

Additionally, Google is adding a button that will let you simplify some AI Overviews, which it previewed earlier this year. Both of these features are available within the “AI Overviews and more” experiment in Search Labs for English queries in the US.

When asked what Google is doing to help prevent these kinds of answers from appearing in other countries and languages, Budaraju says the company has “rigorous evaluation processes and extensive adversarial testing in every market,” adding that “quality and safety are built into the design” of AI Overviews.

“I don’t know that there is a singular way to do search and answer every question that people have at scale in the world, but we are committed to learning and listening actively,” Budaraju says.