Search for “what is the best game on switch 2” and you might not see a single blue link until you’ve scrolled past a wall of machine-written text, a follow-up prompt box, and whatever else Google decided you needed first.
That’s the new behavior. Google has started automatically expanding its AI search summaries at the top of the results page for some queries, a change first reported by Search Engine Roundtable.
What changed, exactly
Until now, an AI Overview showed you a chunk of its response with a “Show more” button. You clicked if you wanted the rest. You didn’t click if you wanted links.
When the new behavior kicks in, that choice is gone. Google shows the full AI Overview at the top, an “Ask anything” box underneath it, and then the list of links. It can lead to a lot of scrolling.
Good luck reproducing it
Here’s the frustrating part for anyone trying to pin this down: it’s unclear exactly what Google’s criteria is for the auto-expanding AI Overviews.
In testing, the behavior showed up on most test searches at first. Then it stopped. Later attempts mostly returned the old format, with the initial part of the response and the “Show more” button sitting where it always has.
The most consistent query for triggering the auto-expanding version is “what is the best game on switch 2”. Even that hasn’t been consistent across searches and browsers.
So this isn’t a flag flipped for everyone at once. It’s something more selective, and Google isn’t spelling out the rules.
Google’s explanation
“For some queries, AI Overviews may dynamically expand for topics where our systems determine it’s most useful for people,” Google spokesperson Jennifer Kutz said in a statement. “Our research has shown that with this dynamic experience, users find Search more helpful and engage deeper in follow-up exploration.”
Note the framing. Deeper engagement in follow-up exploration is a description of people asking Google more questions, which is not the same thing as people finding what they were looking for. The “Ask anything” box sitting directly under the expanded summary makes the intent hard to miss.
Kutz also said that “If users have already begun scrolling to view content below the AI Overview, we cancel expansion so that the user doesn’t lose their reading position.”
That’s a genuine concession, and it matters. Nothing is worse than a page that reflows under your thumb mid-scroll. But it only helps if you start scrolling fast enough to beat the expansion.
Why this one is worth watching
Every previous step in this direction kept a fig leaf of user control. The “Show more” button was the deal: Google put the summary first, you decided how much of it to read before getting to the actual web.
Auto-expansion takes that decision back. And because Google won’t say which queries qualify, you can’t predict when your results page is going to be a list of links versus an essay with links buried under it.
If you want the old layout reliably, the practical move right now is to start scrolling the moment the page loads, before the expansion fires. By Google’s own description, that cancels it.
