Google Reshuffled AI Overviews Links Again. Still Won't Show You the Clicks
Another redesign, still no numbers
Google reshuffled how links look in AI Mode and AI Overviews again. More inline links right inside the answer text, the top 1-2 links pushed to the top, an expanded news carousel, clickable author names. Sounds like progress. In practice — this is yet another change in a string of changes over the past few months, and every time we're stuck guessing what actually moves the needle on traffic.
And click data in AI Performance? Still nowhere to be found. This is the part that matters. Google is happy to redecorate the storefront, but it keeps the back room — where the money gets counted — locked. You can see your content got cited. That's it. How many people actually clicked that inline link through to your site is just as hard to figure out as it was six months ago.
Why this hits iGaming specifically
In our niche, content rarely works as "one fact, one paragraph." Casino reviews, bonus terms breakdowns, bookmaker comparisons — this is usually a wall of text where the key point is buried under disclaimers and legal phrasing. The models building AI Overviews love clean, quotable statements. If your text doesn't hand them a ready-made sentence they can lift and drop straight into the answer, you get passed over — in favor of a competitor who phrased the same paragraph more clearly.
Those top 1-2 links at the top of the answer are the new battlefield. A top-10 ranking used to be enough to grab your slice of traffic. Now a narrow set of sources wins the AI results, and getting in means pushing content relevance close to perfect — not just showing up in the topic.
The news carousel and author markup aren't just for media outlets
The expanded news carousel isn't only relevant to traditional publishers. If your project has a section covering betting or gambling news — regulatory changes, new line launches, market moves — structured data for timely content is now worth taking seriously. It's a separate visibility channel, running parallel to regular organic.
Clickable author names and author/creator markup for video content aren't a minor detail either. I've said this before: in a niche where users are already suspicious of content by default, personalizing the author does more for E-E-A-T than any amount of generic "expertise" copy. If you've got real people writing your reviews or filming your videos, mark them up properly. That's now a literal visibility factor in AI Mode, not just a nice byline.
Preferred Sources — this is where the real movement is
Worth calling out separately: Preferred Sources audience grew sevenfold. That's not noise, that's a signal. Google is clearly pushing a mechanism where the user picks the sources they trust, and AI answers then favor exactly those. For affiliate and content projects in iGaming, this is a new front to fight on: being a quality site isn't enough anymore, you need to become the source people actually add to their preferences. That's a brand recognition question now, not just technical SEO.
What to do while clicks stay hidden
With no precise AI-click data available, the move is to work ahead of the curve: tighten up phrasing for quotability, track your position in the top 1-2 for key topics, prepare structured data for news and video content, mark up your authors. And keep an eye on Search Console's AI Performance metrics regularly — no click breakdown yet, but the impression trends already tell you plenty.
Google isn't in a hurry to share the numbers, but whoever adapts their content to this citation mechanic first is the one who'll clean up the traffic once transparency finally shows up. If you need help rebuilding a content strategy around these changes for an iGaming project specifically — reach out, let's talk right here.