Google is running a test that shrinks the citations panel inside AI Overviews, the narrow strip of source links that sits beside the generated answer. The change was first spotted by Khushal Bherwani, who posted a screenshot on X showing the panel rendered in a noticeably thinner style. Barry Schwartz, editor of Search Engine Roundtable, said he was able to replicate the design and published side-by-side images of the standard and narrowed versions.
The stakes are straightforward. The citations panel is the only mechanism by which an AI Overview sends a click to the page it drew from, so any change to its size touches referral volume directly, not just layout.
A smaller panel gives the citation less visual weight on the results page. That does not guarantee fewer clicks, but it removes the assumption that a link occupying more space earns more attention, and shifts the burden onto testing to show whether narrower citations still convert at the same rate.
AI Overviews, Google’s generative answer block that surfaces above traditional results, has drawn sustained scrutiny from publishers over how much traffic it diverts before a searcher ever reaches a source page. Schwartz’s report does not include click-through data or confirmation that the test is running broadly rather than to a limited slice of users. Google has not commented on the design publicly as of this report, and Search Engine Roundtable’s writeup does not indicate whether the company plans a wider rollout.
That absence of measurement is the real gap. Google has said in the past that AI Overviews send traffic to a diverse set of sites, but the company has not published data tying panel width, or any other citation-display variable, to actual click behavior. Without that, a narrower panel reads as a design experiment that publishers can only evaluate after the fact, through their own Search Console referral numbers.
The pattern is familiar. Google has iterated on AI Overviews’ visual treatment repeatedly since the feature’s 2024 launch, and each layout change has arrived without an accompanying impact study, leaving site owners to reconstruct the effect from their own analytics rather than from anything Google discloses in advance.
Publishers that rely on AI Overviews citations for even a modest share of referral traffic should start tracking impressions and clicks on cited pages now, before a wider rollout makes it harder to isolate the panel’s effect from seasonal or query-mix noise. A week of Search Console data captured while the test is still limited is the only baseline that will let a site tell, later, whether the redesign cost it clicks.
Barry Schwartz reported the test for Search Engine Roundtable on September 8, 2026.
