Google’s AI Overviews are citing external websites inside the answer text far more often than they were earlier this year. Malte Landwehr, who posted the analysis from his company, Peec AI, an AI-search visibility vendor, shared a chart on X showing the share of AI Overviews containing in-answer external links rising from close to zero to more than 25 percent. The jump matters because publishers have spent the past two years assuming AI Overviews mostly summarize without sending traffic back.
Landwehr’s own reaction undercuts any easy narrative here. Barry Schwartz, who reported the data at Search Engine Roundtable, wrote that it “doesn’t feel right” to him, since his own coverage has repeatedly described Google linking out less rather than more. Schwartz also disclosed that he holds a small investment in Peec AI and said he covers the company’s output less often because of it.
That disclosure matters more than usual here. The chart comes from one vendor’s proprietary tracking, not from Google, and neither Schwartz’s writeup nor Landwehr’s post specifies the query set, sample size, or date range behind the numbers. The post does not say how many prompts fed the chart or over what period the shift occurred, and Google has not confirmed or commented on any change to how AI Overviews handle in-answer links.
The direction is still worth watching precisely because it cuts against the pattern practitioners have reported all year. Rank-tracking firms and SEO teams have generally described AI Overviews as citation-heavy in the sidebar but link-light inside the generated answer itself, with most outbound clicks flowing to a handful of reference sources rather than a broad set of publishers. A rise from near zero to a quarter of answers, if it holds up across a larger sample, would mark a real change in how Google structures the answer box, not routine noise in a single tracker’s numbers.
It also lands one day after Comscore data showed lodging sites feeding far more AI answers than they are visibly cited in, a separate signal that AI Overviews draw on publisher content without crediting it at the same rate they use it. Read together, the two reports describe the same tension from opposite angles. One tracks how often Google shows a link. The other tracks how often Google used a site’s content without showing one.
Neither report is confirmed by Google, and Peec AI’s chart in particular needs a larger sample before it should reshape strategy on its own. Teams that track AI Overviews citations should treat this as a prompt to re-run their own link-presence audits this week, comparing current output against exports from a month ago, rather than as proof of a confirmed platform shift. If the increase holds across a broader query set, in-answer link placement becomes a metric worth tracking alongside citation rate, not a footnote to it.
Search Engine Roundtable’s Barry Schwartz reported this tracking data from Malte Landwehr of Peec AI, posted on X.
