Google’s AI-enhanced Search experience tested more prominent source links [U]

Ben Schoon | Aug 18 2023 - 6:27 am PT

The Search Generative Experience (SGE) that Google is testing out with some users shows an interesting future for the world’s most popular search engine, but one that also wasn’t really showing its source links very clearly at first. Now, though, Google seems to be testing more prominent links in SGE.

Since its launch in May, the Search Generative Experience (SGE) in Google Search has been able to use generative AI to enhance search results with summaries related to your search. In a hands-on overview, our Abner Li called the experience “scarily sufficient,” commenting on how SGE makes it easy to ignore source links and just take Google’s answers at face value, even if they aren’t fully accurate.

Those answers may soon start showing more information on where Google’s AI is pulling its answers from.

We’ve observed that Google SGE is starting to show very prominent in-line source links with certain queries, and at least one reader reports seeing the same behavior. The new sourcing method shows the name of the publication/website where the information is coming from right in line with the information itself.

In the test query that triggered the links (seen below), we saw Google reference sources five times in its response, with another carousel of source links off to the right side as they usually appear.

Notably, though, this isn’t appearing very widely. We were only able to trigger this on a single query, with all others still showing Google’s usual paragraph of answers without any prominent sources shown. We suspect this is in early testing currently.

Update 8/18: It seems Google has pulled the plug on this particular change. SearchEngineLand cites several folks who have noticed that, despite source links appearing regularly in SGE over the past couple of weeks, they’ve suddenly disappeared over the past day or two. We were never seeing source links very widely, but we’re also unable to trigger results at all at this point.

9to5Google’s Take

This is a huge improvement for Google’s AI-enhanced search if it ends up being widely used by Google.

More prominent links, especially in this style, make it easier to trust Google’s response and dive further into the information. It also better credits the original source of the information. Shortly after SGE went live, we even caught the AI directly plagiarizing our own content, and the source linking wasn’t very obvious. Google’s new method doesn’t make it any less right that the AI is effectively stealing content, but at least it’s giving proper credit now and perhaps while also directing more traffic through to the sources.