Hate AI Search Results? Tough. Google Is Expanding Them Even More
Google's AI Overviews has been controversial since it began rolling out in May 2024, with some users complaining about being unable to easily remove the feature , and some of the world's largest publishers pushing back against its potential impact on their revenues.
Google is now expanding the depth and detail of the AI Overviews it displays via Google Search. For select searches, some users report that the "Show More" button has been removed, with results jumping right into AI Mode and pushing the familiar blue links even further down the page.
According to users on social media, Google is displaying full AI responses, comparable to what they'd see if they enabled AI Mode. The pages also sometimes automatically load the "Ask anything" box, which allows users to enter additional prompts and questions on the subject.
Google confirmed the move in a statement to SEO Roundtable, which first spotted the change, but it stressed that the changes won't apply to all search queries, only some.
"AI Overviews only dynamically expand for topics where our systems determine it to be most useful. If you've already started scrolling, the expansion stops to keep your place," Robby Stein, Google VP of Product for AI Search, tweeted . "We're always testing and tuning these experiences, so we'll continue to refine based on user feedback," he added.
At present, it seems there is no surefire way to trigger one of these automatically expanded AI Overviews, though users on X seem to note that some prompts fare better than others.
As noted by Barry Schwartz, one of the first X users to post about the change, the move is "not great for publishers." They've spent years investing in SEO to get their content featured prominently in Google Search or on Google News, but now, features like AI Overviews are scraping their content to produce AI summaries that take up half the page. Yes, there are source links, and the direct links appear below the AI, but few people are clicking .
In September, Penske Media (PMC), the company behind brands like Rolling Stone, Billboard, Variety, and The Hollywood Reporter, sued Google over the feature, alleging it was negatively impacting its affiliate revenue. In July, Google was also hit with an antitrust complaint in the European Union from the nonprofit Independent Publishers Alliance.
Though you can't disable AI Overviews completely, there are ways to limit the amount you see when browsing.
Disclosure: Ziff Davis, PCMag's parent company, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in April 2025, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.
PCMag and Yahoo may earn commission from links in this article.
