Google will test a slot for official pages at the top of AI answers

The post, by Google's VP of product management Hema Budaraju, lists five changes. Inline links, the links set into words in an answer, will show higher up in responses more often, and Google says it has already made "continued and substantial increases" in how many appear. The links at the end of some answers get image thumbnails and a more clickable design. The carousels of timely articles that Google introduced in May are starting to roll out to more locations and languages, which Google did not name.

The other two are tests. One is the official-page section. The other, started this week, makes creator and publisher names on video results in AI Mode clickable, leading to their Search profiles. Google also said the number of people using its Preferred Sources feature has grown more than 7x since the start of the year, without giving a starting figure. 9to5Google reported the same five changes the same day.

Not every link in an AI answer leads to a website. Search Engine Roundtable reported on 22 September that some normal-looking links at the bottom of AI Overviews take searchers into AI Mode instead, and updated the report on 13 October with a post on X showing the same in mobile AI Mode.

Many searches that name a brand are tasks with one right page: cancelling a contract, logging in, making a claim, tracking an order, finding a phone number. Google says the test "expands on what we already do today to show links front and center when you're looking to go to a particular site." If it works as described, the page on your site that handles each task has a clearer route to the top of the answer, and a missing or buried page leaves the slot to whatever Google treats as official instead. That is our reading; Google has not said how it will choose.

Brand searches already lean on other sites. When we searched the names of 50 well-known UK brands on Google UK three times each on 6 October, 78 of the 150 searches showed an AI Overview. The median overview cited four websites, and the brand's main website was among them in 71 of the 78. In the other seven it was missing: one overview for Wise cited Wikipedia, Yahoo Finance UK, LinkedIn and YouTube but not wise.com, and one for Asda cited three news and trade sites but not asda.com. In one of the seven, for Deliveroo, Google cited the brand's help site but not its main website.

Those were searches for the bare brand name, not for tasks, so they do not show how the new section will behave. They do show that a summary about your brand is assembled from several sources, and that your own site is not guaranteed a place in it.

List the five or six tasks customers most often search your brand name for, such as "cancel", "contact", "returns" or "login". For each, make sure one page on your site does the job: a plain title that names the task, the answer or the form near the top, no login wall in front of the instructions, and the same wording your help centre and app use. Two half-finished pages for the same task can make it harder for Google to tell which is the official one.

Then see what Google cites for your brand today. Our free Google AI Overview checker runs a search from a clean UK browser and lists the pages the overview cited, so you can tell whether your own site is among them. Search Console's AI report counts how often your pages were linked from AI Overviews and AI Mode, which we covered in what the Search Console report shows; export it monthly, so any change if the test reaches the UK shows against a baseline. For how Google picks the sources for these summaries, see our Google AI Overviews rank tracker page.

The brand figures come from our reading of 6 October 2026: 50 UK brand names chosen in advance, five in each of ten sectors, each searched three times on Google UK while logged out, between 17:07 and 17:17 UK time. Two of the 78 overviews showed no sources we could capture, and both count among the seven without the brand's main website. The method and sector results are in our reading of UK brand searches, and the download has every reading and every domain cited.