News & analysis
Google Redesigns AI Mode Links, Still Withholds Click Data
Google rolled out new link placements and designs in AI Mode and AI Overviews, but has not added click-through data to its AI performance reports.
By Roomer Editorial · · 3 min read
What did Google change in AI Mode and AI Overviews?
Google pushed a batch of updates to how links appear inside AI Mode and AI Overviews. More inline links are now embedded directly in responses. Some links are placed higher up, and for certain queries Google will show one or two links to what it calls the "right web page." Timely article carousels are expanding to more regions and languages. Related-article link designs are more prominent. Google is also testing links from creator and publisher names on videos in AI Mode, though those currently route to Google's own Search profile pages first, not the creator's site.
Why won't Google show click data?
Google has not committed to adding click data to its AI performance reports. The company's response, quoted by Search Engine Roundtable: it is "continuing to work with website owners to understand what insights will be most helpful" and will "introduce additional metrics over time."
Clicks are the one number publishers and creators actually want. Clicks are also arguably the single most important metric in Google Ads. Google's update framed all these link changes as efforts to drive more clicks out of AI answers, but it has not released any data showing whether that is happening.
What's the story with Preferred Sources?
Google also reported that use of Preferred Sources, a feature letting searchers pick sites they want to see more of, has grown more than 7x since the start of the year. Preferred picks now get surfaced in the new timely-article carousels. Google framed this as evidence that people want more control over whose content they see in AI results.
Roomer Editorial's take
None of this changes what a travel creator needs to do. Google will keep rearranging link placement inside AI Mode indefinitely, and it will keep declining to hand over the click numbers that would tell you if any of it works. Treat every AI Overview as a black box. Don't build a strategy around getting cited inside one.
What you can control is what happens after someone does click, however rarely. If a reader lands on your own site from an AI Mode link, a Reels caption, or a Google search, that page needs a bookable path waiting for it, not a dead-end blog post. That's the whole case for owning your own travel site instead of renting space inside someone else's AI summary.
Preferred Sources is worth watching for the same reason. A 7x jump in people manually selecting the sites they want to hear from is a signal that some searchers are tired of generic AI answers and are hunting for named creators and specific voices. That favors anyone who has built a recognizable site under their own name, with their own URL, rather than anyone depending on an aggregator to surface their work by chance.
One concrete move: if your videos already live on Roomer, check that your creator name and site show up clearly wherever that content surfaces, since Google is now testing creator-name links on video results in AI Mode. Being identifiable as a named source, not just a video thumbnail, is the only lever here you actually control.
A second thing worth doing now, while the AI search layer keeps shifting under everyone: audit which of your own pages are actually indexed and ranking on their own, separate from anything Google decides to surface inside an AI response. With roughly a million pages from Roomer creators already indexed on Google, a bookable page you own and control can still earn traffic the old-fashioned way, through search results, even on weeks when AI Overviews send nothing back your way.
Source: Search Engine Roundtable
