Google confirmed that some AI Overviews now expand to their full length automatically, eliminating the “Show more” button for a subset of queries. The change pushes traditional organic results further down the page without any user interaction required. It marks one of the clearest signs yet that Google is folding AI Mode’s response format directly into the standard search results page.
A Google spokesperson told Search Engine Land that the dynamic expansion appears “for topics where our systems determine it’s most useful for people,” and that internal research shows users “engage deeper in follow-up exploration” as a result. That justification rests entirely on Google’s own measurement. The announcement includes no independent data on how the change affects click-through or ranking visibility.
The expansion is not fixed once triggered. If a searcher has already begun scrolling past the AI Overview toward the results below, Google cancels the expansion rather than disrupt a reading position already in progress. That detail suggests the system responds to in-session behavior signals, not only to a fixed query classification.
Marketer Chris Long flagged the behavior on X, noting that the AI Mode prompt box now surfaces by default inside regular Search results for some queries. He described it as evidence that Google is treating AI Mode as the emerging default experience rather than a separate destination. Google has not disputed that reading of the rollout.
The timing is not incidental. Days earlier, the developing-topic link carousel arrived inside AI Mode, having already shipped on AI Overviews. Taken together, the two changes narrow the gap between the two surfaces: citation and expansion behavior built for AI Mode is migrating into the main results page instead of staying confined to a separate tab.
Google declined to say what share of queries triggers the full expansion or whether it plans to widen the rollout. That omission carries weight. A narrow test and a default behavior have very different consequences for organic visibility, and search teams currently have no way to tell which one their own traffic is facing.
For sites already showing click declines since AI Overviews launched broadly, full expansion removes the last soft boundary, the “Show more” click, that separated a compact AI summary from a page takeover. Once an overview reaches full length without a click, the listings beneath it lose the marginal visibility a collapsed summary used to preserve.
Search teams should pull Search Console impression and click data for queries where they hold a featured snippet or position one, since those results sit most directly beneath an expanded overview. Any query that already triggers an AI Overview is a candidate for this behavior, and testing exposure now is worth doing before the feature reaches a larger share of a site’s tracked keywords over the next quarter.
Search Engine Land’s Barry Schwartz first reported the dynamic AI Overview expansion on August 28, 2026.
