TLDR
Google announced more inline links and new link formats for AI Mode and AI Overviews on 15 October 2026, including a dedicated top-of-response section and expanded article carousels. Preferred Sources usage is up more than 7x since January, and users who pick a preferred outlet click through roughly twice as often. Publishers still cannot see click or click-through rate data in Search Console, with no firm date for when those metrics will arrive.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
What Google changed on 15 October 2026
Google announced continued and substantial increases to inline links in AI Mode and AI Overviews, with those links appearing higher in responses more frequently.[1] Google is also testing a dedicated section at the top of AI search responses, designed to surface key links alongside context explaining why each source is useful.[1]
Article carousels for timely content are rolling out to more locations and languages, with Preferred Sources displayed inside them.[1] Related-article links are getting image thumbnails and a more clickable design.[1]
One feature worth examining closely: Google is testing clickable creator and publisher names on AI Mode video results.[1] Those names link to Google Search profiles, not directly to the publisher's own site. For a publisher hoping AI Mode drives traffic, there is a gap between appearing and being clicked to.
Preferred Sources, the feature that lets users star favourite news outlets in Top Stories and expanded to English-language users worldwide in December 2025, is growing fast. According to Hema Budaraju, Google's VP of Product Management, the number of people who now use the Preferred Sources feature has grown by more than 7x since the start of the year.[1] Google's own data from the December 2025 rollout showed that when someone picks a Preferred Source, they click through to that site about twice as often on average.[2]
That 7x figure is a growth multiple with no baseline user count published, and publishers have no way to cross-check it against their own traffic.
The measurement gap publishers still face
Search Console's generative AI report, with data from 18 May 2026, shows impressions for pages appearing in AI Overviews, AI Mode and Discover's AI features. It does not show clicks or click-through rate (CTR). "The report shows impressions and nothing else," 99signals' Sandeep Mallya wrote in June.[3]
Asked again this week by Search Engine Roundtable's Barry Schwartz to add click data, Google said: "we'll introduce additional metrics over time."[4] It gave no date.
Google can report a 7x lift in Preferred Sources usage. Publishers cannot report a single click that came from an AI answer. The metric Google shares measures its own product engagement; the metric publishers need measures whether their business benefits from being in that product.
The gap runs wider than Search Console. Visits from ChatGPT are now being recorded as direct traffic in analytics after OpenAI's links stopped carrying tracking tags, as we reported this week, so publishers are undercounting AI-referred visits on more than one surface.
Australian publishers and search teams
Australian publishers and search engine optimisation (SEO) teams face the same reporting gap as everyone else.
Preferred Sources remains the one lever publishers can directly pull. The twice-as-often CTR lift Google cited in December 2025 is meaningful if it holds at scale, but publishers cannot verify it for their own properties because the click data to confirm it is absent from their reporting tools.[2]
"Over time" is still the only commitment on record for when click data might arrive in Search Console.[4]
SOURCES & CITATIONS
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
What is Preferred Sources and how does it affect publisher traffic?
What does Google's AI performance report in Search Console actually show?
Do the new publisher names on AI Mode video results link to publishers' sites?
James Dore is founder and editor of Prompt the Market and Strategy Director at Bushnote, a Sydney strategy, SEO and AI search agency. He has a background in strategy, media and financial services, and led consumer product marketing at MONEYME. He writes on AI search, answer engines, technology policy and media economics.
