Google just started putting Top Stories carousels directly inside AI Overviews for news searches

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Google has begun showing a Top Stories carousel of publisher links directly inside AI Overview summaries for roughly one in five relevant news searches, according to analysis from SEO tracking firm Newzdash, which studied more than 17 million Top Stories placements across the past 30 days in the US and UK specifically, the only two markets where this feature has rolled out so far

When this new placement triggers it replaces rather than supplements the classic standalone Top Stories box that normally sits underneath an AI Overview, which actually makes the links more prominent than before since users no longer have to scroll past the AI generated summary to reach them, Newzdash found this happens in 15.5 percent of relevant US searches and 17.5 percent in the UK

Entertainment news is by far the category most likely to trigger this placement, showing up 35.1 percent of the time in the US and 31.5 percent in the UK, followed by world news and sports news, which suggests Google is being more cautious about deploying this specifically for breaking or high stakes news categories where getting a citation wrong carries more weight

Newzdash's CEO John Shehata called this a double edged sword for publishers, on one hand it puts actual publisher headlines, images and links directly into the AI experience rather than burying them below a large generated answer, which should mean more clicks than the old standalone placement further down the page, on the other hand Google is simultaneously rolling out new opt out controls that let publishers exclude their content from AI Overviews entirely, and doing so appears to forfeit eligibility for this exact embedded placement even though standalone Top Stories elsewhere on the page is not guaranteed as a fallback

That opt out control itself only exists because of a ruling from the UK's Competition and Markets Authority, and panelists from the Daily Mail, The Economist and AI search company Prorata have all been publicly encouraging other publishers to actually experiment with opting out despite the uncertainty, with one describing it as a travesty if publishers don't at least try using the control now that it exists, so this is playing out as a live experiment in how much leverage publishers actually have over how their journalism gets surfaced inside an AI summary

Google adds Top Stories links to many news-related AI summariespressgazette.co.uk

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Replacing rather than supplementing the standalone box is the detail that actually matters here, that's a real structural change to how visible publisher links are, not just a cosmetic addition