Google may be testing or rolling out AI-written descriptions in the citation cards that sit beside AI Overviews, Search Engine Roundtable reported on Oct. 23. The cards can now show a model-generated summary of a cited page instead of text drawn from it.
Brodie Clark spotted the change. He wrote that the wording “doesn’t appear exactly like this on the page,” and that Google condenses the content around whatever it judges most relevant to the query. Barry Schwartz reproduced it on some of his own test queries, but not all, which points to a partial rollout or an experiment.
The card description is the pitch a publisher makes for the click. When Google writes it, the publisher loses control over the sentence that helps decide whether a reader visits. Neither report says how widely the summaries appear or whether they change click-through.
Teams should capture the citation cards for their top AI Overview queries now and compare the displayed text with the page copy, so any drift in framing shows up early.
Reported by Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable on Oct. 23, 2026, based on an observation by Brodie Clark.
