Google has begun giving publishers a prominent “Top Stories” plug above many news-based queries which generate an AI Overview summary.
While the move could lead to more referral traffic for publishers, they could lose the opportunity to feature in these snippets if they opt out of allowing their content to be used in AI Overviews.
The move is also a sign that AI Overviews are increasingly being deployed by Google to summarise breaking news, an area which had previously been more protected from the disruptive influence of AI-written Google answers.
Entertainment is the category of news most likely to generate a Top Stories box within Google AI Overviews, according to analysis from Newzdash.
Google began to roll out placing a Top Stories carousel of news website links within the AI summary at the top of search results from June.
When this appears, it is instead of – rather than additional to – the classic Top Stories box which appears underneath an AI Overview, meaning these links are more prominent than they would have been otherwise as users do not have to scroll down to see them.
According to news and publishing SEO company Newzdash, 15.5% of Google search results for trending news topics that brought up a Top Stories carousel showed it within the AI Overview rather than in its standalone position lower down.
In the UK, a Top Stories box appears in the AI Overview 17.5% of all the times it shows up.
Newzdash analysed search results from more than 40 countries but only the UK and US are so far showing Top Stories in AI Overviews.
The analysis was based on the past 30 days up to 28 July and included more than 17 million Top Stories.
The new feature appeared at the first time of trying for Press Gazette with a search for “Burnham social care” on 30 July. Articles from the BBC, The Guardian and Caring Times were prominently displayed at the top of the page under an AI Overview introductory sentence.
Top Stories similarly appeared in an AI Overview for the search “funeral director sentencing”. Again the most visible links were from the BBC and The Guardian.
Entertainment is the news category most likely to put Top Stories in the AI Overviews: 35.1% of the time in the US and 31.5% in the UK.
This is followed by world news (31.8% in the US but only 18.9% in the UK) and sports news (16.5% in the US and 21.1% in the UK).
Newzdash founder and CEO John Shehata told Press Gazette: “Top Stories inside AI Overviews is a double-edged sword for publishers.
“On the positive side, Google has promised to make links more prominent in its AI experiences, and embedding a full Top Stories carousel directly inside the AI Overview is one way of delivering more publisher links in prominent way where users are already focused.
“Instead of placing a large AI-generated answer above the news results, Google is putting publisher headlines, images and links directly into that experience. We do not yet have comparative clickthrough data, but it should create a stronger opportunity for clicks than pushing Top Stories further down the page.”
Currently, according to Semrush, almost half (47%) of all Google search results pages feature an AI Overview across all query types.
However Shehata said the change could create a new trade-off as Google has begun to introduce new controls allowing publishers to opt out of their content and links being used in AI Overviews and AI Mode. This rollout began in the UK in response to a ruling from the Competition and Markets Authority.
He noted that this could mean publishers that turn on these controls miss out on the chance to be shown prominently in Top Stories within an AI summary.
Shehata said: “The downside is the new opt-out tradeoff. In the search results tracked by NewzDash, Top Stories appeared either inside the AI Overview or as a standalone module, not both. Publishers that use Google’s Search Console control to exclude their content from generative AI features will likely lose eligibility for the embedded Top Stories placement. They may remain eligible for standalone Top Stories, but there is no guarantee Google will display that module elsewhere on the same results page.
“NewzDash data currently shows this format on approximately 15% to 17% of trending-news searches with Top Stories in the US and UK, so it is already significant enough for publishers to watch closely.”
Panellists from AI search company Prorata, the Daily Mail and The Economist encouraged publishers to experiment with Google’s opt-out controls at Press Gazette’s AI Summit earlier this month.
Prorata senior strategy adviser Eugene Huang said “you might not like that it is opt out versus opt in, but it will be a travesty if none of you decide that opting out is an action that you want to take” while The Economist’s head of generative AI Josh Muncke said the new controls were “another pathway for us to test and experiment and learn what works and what doesn’t work in an ecosystem that is moving really quickly”.
Shehata also reassured publishers if they want to block Google’s crawler in robots.txt: “Blocking Google-Extended alone should not affect a publisher’s visibility in AI Overviews or Top Stories. Google-Extended controls specified model-training and grounding uses.
“The separate Search Console generative AI exclusion controls whether a publisher’s links and content can appear in AI Overviews, AI Mode and generative AI features in Discover. Google has not explicitly confirmed how that exclusion applies to the Top Stories module inside AI Overviews, but its documentation says opted-out sites will not be linked within those features, making exclusion from the embedded carousel the most likely outcome.”
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