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Google AI Overviews now auto-expand: what it changes in Search Console

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Shahid AliSeptember 6, 2026all posts

Google AI Overviews now auto-expand: what it changes in Search Console

Google AI Overviews now auto-expand on some queries, opening to the full answer without anyone clicking “Show more”, which pushes the ordinary results further down the page. Google has confirmed it. What nobody has written yet is what that does to the numbers you look at, so that is the part I want to work through, including the bit where the honest answer is that we cannot tell yet.

What Google actually said

There is one sentence of Google wording on this, given to Search Engine Roundtable by a spokesperson on 28 August 2026: “For some queries, AI Overviews may dynamically expand for topics where our systems determine it’s most useful for people.”

A second sentence appears in the version 9to5Google carried: “Our research has shown that with this dynamic experience, users find Search more helpful and engage deeper in follow-up exploration.”

That is the entire primary record. There is no Search Central post, no entry on blog.google, no Search Liaison thread. A statement to two trade publications is what we have, which is worth saying out loud before anyone builds a strategy on it.

Search Engine Land added one behavioural detail worth knowing: if you have already started scrolling past the AI Overview, the expansion is cancelled so you do not lose your place. That is Barry Schwartz’s observation of the behaviour, not something Google stated, and I would treat it as reported rather than documented.

Two things I have seen repeated that I could not stand up anywhere: that this is limited to signed-in users, and that it is a Google AI Pro or Ultra feature. No source says either. The Pro and Ultra gate that does exist is a separate thing, the Gemini 3.8 Flash model becoming selectable in AI Mode on 2 September, and it has been blurred together with this change in a few writeups.

Google has also not said what share of queries this affects, or which kinds. The only trigger anyone has evidenced is definitional queries, and that is an outside observation rather than a Google statement.

The impression question nobody is asking

Here is what makes this interesting rather than just annoying, and it turns on a rule most people have never read.

Google’s help page on impressions has a general rule and an exception. The general rule: “an impression is counted whenever an item appears in the current page of results, whether or not the item is scrolled into view, as long as the user need not click to see more results (such as being required to click ‘see more’ to see the link).”

The exception, for things that expand: “the item must typically be scrolled into view within the carousel, or expanded by a click, to register an impression.” That is how Google treats People Also Ask and FAQ rich results. Links hidden behind a click do not earn an impression until the click happens.

Now read what the same page says about AI Overviews. The entire entry is: “Impression: Standard impression rules apply.” And on position: “An AI Overview occupies a single position in search results, and all links in the AI Overview are assigned that same position.”

The collapsed AI Overview had a “Show more” button. Whether the citations sitting behind that button counted as impressions before you pressed it is the whole question, and Google has never published which side of its own line they fell on.

Two readings of the same change, and Google has documented neither The collapsed AI Overview Citations sat behind a "Show more" button. Google's doc says only "standard impression rules apply". If they were NOT counted before Auto-expansion inflates your generative AI impressions with no new visibility gained. Signature: gen AI impressions up, web clicks flat. If they were ALWAYS counted Impressions stay flat and only the click-through rate moves. Signature: gen AI impressions flat, web clicks down.

Google’s impression documentation draws a hard line at click-to-reveal elements for People Also Ask and FAQ results, and never says which side the collapsed AI Overview sat on. Both branches above are unverified. Checked 6 September 2026.

I want to be clear that this is my reading of two Google documents placed next to each other, not a finding. But it matters, because the two branches produce opposite-looking reports for the same underlying event, and if you compare windows across late August without knowing that, you will draw a confident conclusion from an ambiguous number.

What to actually check

The generative AI performance report finished rolling out worldwide on 31 August 2026, so most properties now have it. Google’s help page describes what it holds: “Impressions are how many times links to your site were shown to a user in a generative AI feature on Google Search.”

The comparison I would run:

  1. Open Performance, then the generative AI report. Compare 28 August to 24 September against 31 July to 27 August. Group by page.
  2. Then Performance, Search results, search type Web, the same two windows, looking at clicks and click-through rate.
  3. The pattern to look for is generative AI impressions rising while Web clicks stay flat or fall on the same pages. That is impressions holding while clicks do not, which is a pattern I have written about before and which now has one more plausible cause behind it.

Four limits on that comparison, and they are all real:

  • The generative AI report has impressions and no clicks. You cannot calculate a click-through rate for AI surfaces from it. This is the same wall I described in whether you can see AI Mode traffic in Search Console, and it has not moved.
  • AI Overviews and AI Mode are merged. The report covers “generative AI features” with no split between them. Gemini 3.8 Flash arrived in AI Mode on 2 September, four days after this change was confirmed, and there is no way to tell one effect from the other in your data.
  • Position is meaningless here. Every link in an AI Overview is assigned the same single position, so an average position on AI rows tells you nothing about being first or eighth in the citation list.
  • Small properties may see nothing at all. This site’s own Search Console shows 4,517 impressions and 28 clicks across the 28 days to 5 September, at an average position of 39.8. At that scale a change of this kind is invisible in the noise, and I would not pretend to read a trend from it. If you are running a site this size, the useful move is to write the date down and wait, not to squint at a chart.

What I am doing about it

Nothing to the pages, which is the same answer I gave when I looked at whether AI Overviews need optimizing for at all. Google has said in writing that there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews, and an expansion behaviour does not change that.

What I am doing is bookkeeping. Every account I run gets 28 August written into its notes as a boundary, the same way I logged the spam update dates in August, so that in six weeks nobody attributes a click decline to a content change that shipped in the same fortnight. Half of measurement is having written the dates down before you needed them.

For anyone whose reaction to all this is to want out entirely, that is a separate decision with a separate mechanism, and I have covered keeping content out of AI Overviews including the property-level control that now exists.

The new report counts impressions and stops there, so it settles less than it looks like it should. What it cannot tell you, and the sampling that can, is in AI search visibility.

Sources

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