It appears Google is trying to drink its own E-E-A-T Kool-Aid with respect to the 5 AI search linking enhancements being rolled into AI Overviews and AI Mode:
- “Explore new angles.” Here Google is anticipating potential fan-out queries and is prompting you to dive deeper into your prompt topic with links to articles, analyses, and other related content. It’s definitely an attempt to improve the user Experience.
- “Easily access your news subscriptions.” This feature will highlight links from your news subscriptions in AI Mode and AI Overviews. It clearly amplifies the Trust factor (provided you trust the sources you subscribe to). One question is if it also might skew the AI algorithm to narrow the breadth of content presented, aka “preaching to the converted or choir”?
- “Get advice from people who have been there.” AI responses will now include links that “provide a preview of perspectives from public online discussions, social media, and other firsthand sources.” Human Experience, check. Expertise, Authority, and Trust, TBD based on the quality of links and content being presented.
- “See links right where you need them.” More links will be embedded directly within AI responses right next to the relevant text. This could be a plus for user Experience, but the rest of the E-A-T depends on how relevant the content presented really is.
- “Get more context on linked websites.” Another attempt to provide elements of Expertise, Authority and Trust to preview and prompt a link click…
…Hmm, wait a minute as a cynical idea coalesces…
Is Google really adding these enhancements to help the user with a better AI response? Or is it just trying to bolster the reportedly very low Click-Through-Rates on AI Overviews and AI Mode citation links? Let’s go with both things so Google can have its cake (link clinks) and E-E-A-T it, too.
