Google made a quiet but important set of changes to how links work inside AI Mode and AI Overviews this week and most SEOs have missed it.
Google released five improvements to links in AI Mode and AI Overviews. The question the industry is asking is whether these improvements are enough to address the click-through rate concerns publishers have been raising since AI Overviews launched.
The five improvements signal that Google is aware the current linking experience inside AI answers is not serving publishers well enough.
When an AI Overview answers a question, the links it includes are often buried below the fold or presented in a way that reduces the likelihood of a click. The improvements Google made are aimed at making those links more visible and more contextually relevant to the answer being given.
For schema practitioners, this matters because the pages being linked inside AI Overviews are overwhelmingly the ones with clean structured data. Google also rolled out preferred sources globally and added preferred sources in AI Mode.
That preferred sources feature is directly influenced by how clearly your site’s entity signals are structured. Sites with complete Organisation and Article schema, clear SameAs identifiers, and consistent NAP data across the web are the ones showing up as preferred sources.
Reddit’s r/TechSEO at https://www.reddit.com/r/TechSEO/ has a thread breaking down each of the five link improvements and what they mean for click-through rates in practice. Early testing shows modest improvements in link visibility but the fundamental AI answers-first dynamic has not changed.
What Preferred Sources Means for Your Schema Strategy
The preferred sources feature is the most practically important development in this update for schema practitioners. Google is now explicitly categorizing sources as preferred or non-preferred inside AI Mode.
Getting into the preferred sources tier requires the same signals that have always driven E-E-A-T — demonstrable expertise, authoritative entity signals, and consistent brand presence across the web.
X at https://x.com/search?q=Google+AI+Mode+preferred+sources+links+2026 has SEOs sharing their early data on which schema configurations are correlating with preferred source status.
Quora at https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-become-a-preferred-source-in-Google-AI-Mode has answers from technical SEOs on the specific schema and entity optimization steps most likely to influence preferred source eligibility.
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