The control that kept Google’s AI answers compressed has started disappearing. On some desktop searches since late August, AI Overviews have loaded at full length by default, with the “Show more” button gone and an “Ask anything” prompt box open beneath the answer, leaving the first organic result further down the page than its ranking implies.

Google has confirmed the behaviour without announcing it as a product change or saying how many queries are affected. That leaves marketing teams defending organic search budgets on a position number that no longer describes what a searcher sees. The space above the first blue link has become variable by query, and the one Google report that could size the consequence carries impressions but no clicks.

What has Google changed on the results page?

Google has replaced the collapsed AI Overview with a full one on an undisclosed subset of queries. Under the previous layout, Search loaded an opening portion of the generated answer behind a “Show more” control, and the prompt box leading into AI Mode appeared only after a click. On affected queries the whole answer now loads immediately, followed by the “Ask anything” box, and then the conventional list of links.

Chris Long, co-founder of the SEO agency Nectiv, posted the first public example on X on 27 August. Barry Schwartz replicated it at Search Engine Roundtable the following day, and The Verge published Google’s statement on 28 August. Google spokesperson Jennifer Kutz said AI Overviews “may dynamically expand for topics where our systems determine it’s most useful”, adding that the company’s research shows users engaging more deeply in follow-up exploration. Kutz also said the expansion is cancelled for a reader who has already begun scrolling, so their position on the page is preserved.

Coverage so far describes the behaviour on desktop only. Android Authority found the expanded layout on desktop while mobile still showed the truncated overview, requiring a tap to reach the box that launches AI Mode, the surface where searches already run three times longer than traditional queries. The Verge reported the trigger firing inconsistently across repeated searches and browsers. Google’s own description is of a decision taken per query, by systems it has not documented.

How much of the click loss is proven?

The Indian School of Business and Carnegie Mellon University produced the first causal measurement of what AI Overviews cost publishers, and the figure is close to 40%. In a randomised field experiment posted to the Social Science Research Network on 3 April 2026 and revised on 17 June, Saharsh Agarwal and Ananya Sen used a browser extension to assign 1,065 US desktop Chrome users to see or not see AI Overviews, running each participant for two weeks between January and February 2026. On queries where an overview would have appeared, hiding it lifted outbound organic clicks by 39.8% and cut zero-click searches by 34.5%. Reported satisfaction with the search experience did not move.

Two findings in that paper bear directly on the expansion. AI Overviews triggered on roughly 41% of observed queries, and more than 87% of them occupied the top slot above every organic result. The expansion adds depth to an answer that was already sitting above the first organic link on the great majority of the queries where it appeared.

Observational work points the same way without settling it. Pew Research Center, tracking 68,879 real searches by 900 US adults in March 2025, found users clicked a traditional result 8% of the time when an AI Overview was present, against 15% when it was not. The agency Seer Interactive, tracking 53 brands across 5.47 million queries, recorded organic click-through rate on AI Overview queries falling from 1.76% to 0.61% between June 2024 and September 2025, then recovering to 2.4% by February 2026. Seer reads that recovery as a levelling off rather than a return. None of these datasets measures the auto-expanded layout, which is less than two weeks old.

What can marketing teams actually measure?

Search Console reports how often a page appears inside AI Overviews and AI Mode, and not how often anyone clicks it. Google launched dedicated Search generative AI performance reports on 3 June 2026 and confirmed on 31 August that they had reached every website worldwide. They carry impressions, pages, countries, devices and dates, at hourly to monthly granularity. They do not carry clicks, click-through rate, queries or average position, which is the half that would price the change.

That gap has a fixed end date. The Competition and Markets Authority imposed its Publisher Conduct Requirement on Google on 3 June 2026, the first conduct requirement issued under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024. It obliges Google to supply “transparency metrics for search AI features, including impressions, clicks, and click-through rate” aggregated across AI Overviews and AI Mode, alongside referral data on the quality of the traffic. Google has until 3 December 2026 to comply, with a further three months to deliver page-level controls.

Until then the observable work sits with the teams themselves, and it is narrower than it sounds. Because the expansion is decided per query, appears on desktop and fires inconsistently between sessions, a priority keyword set can be checked by hand and logged: which queries expand, which hold the collapsed layout, and how far the first organic result sits below the answer. That record costs an afternoon, and it is the baseline that will make December’s click data readable. Ranking positions have not moved. What sits above them has.

Google’s deadline to supply publishers with impressions, clicks and click-through rate for its AI search features is 3 December 2026.