Peec AI recorded a jump in Google AI Overview external links from near zero to 26.2 percent between 11 and 20 September

Search Engine Journal's Matt G. Southern reported on 25 September that Peec AI observed a large jump in external links inside Google's AI Overview answers over the past month, alongside a second post from Gagan Ghotra showing one AI Overview link going into AI Mode rather than to a website. Both raise the same question for a site owner: which links inside an AI Overview show up in Search Console, and which do not.

Peec AI's chart, posted on 21 September by Malte Landwehr, is titled "External links in AI Overviews rise to 26%" and shows the share of AI Overviews carrying an external link inside the answer text, averaged for each day from 25 August to 20 September. The line sits near zero from 25 August to 10 September, then rises sharply at a point marked "11 Sep," stays in the low to mid-20s, and reaches 26.2 percent on 20 September. Landwehr did not publish the sample size, the market, the device, or the rule used to decide whether a link counted as inline, a citation card or an end-of-response suggestion.

Ghotra's post is an 18-second recording of him clicking underlined text inside an AI Overview and being taken to an AI Mode conversation rather than a website. The path has existed on mobile since Google's January follow-up feature, described by Robby Stein, VP of Product for Google Search, on 27 January.

How Search Console counts each kind of link

Google's help page on AI Overviews states that "Clicking a link to an external page in the AI Overview counts as a click," with every link inside a single AI Overview sharing the same position. A separate rule covers query refinement: "If a link is a query refinement link, clicks and impressions are not counted for that link." A user who follows one is regarded as running the new query shown in the search terms box, and everything on the new page is counted from that query.

Whether the underlined text Ghotra recorded is treated as a query refinement is not stated in the material Southern reviewed. The help page describes the general rule and the AI Mode follow-up separately, and does not name the category the underlined-text element belongs to.

The generative AI report is impressions only

Search Console's generative AI performance report went to every site worldwide on 31 August, after a test that began in June. It shows impressions grouped by page, country, date or device. Clicks and click-through rate are absent from that view.

The report sits inside Web search performance, which already includes clicks from AI Overviews and AI Mode among every other Web search click. Dividing overall clicks by AI-only impressions produces a number that cannot be read as a click-through rate for AI features, because the numerator counts a superset of the denominator's source.

The chart also sums impressions by property. If one AI response links to two pages on the same site, the chart shows one impression at the property level and one impression per page in the Pages table. That gap matters when comparing the generative AI figure against the wider Web search total.

For a site owner watching AI Overview traffic, the report answers one question: how often the site appeared inside an AI Overview or AI Mode response. Click volume for AI features stays blended into the Web search click total, with no per-feature click-through rate anywhere in the tool.

Source

• Search Engine Journal: Google AI Overviews Have More Links, But Not All Reach The Web, by Matt G. Southern, 25 September 2026.