Google Is Auto-Expanding AI Overviews — Pushing Search Results Further Down

Google has confirmed that for some queries AI Overviews may dynamically expand to their full state, replacing the snippet with a full detailed response. AI Overview expansion removes the "Show more" button and also pushes down the core search results people could previously see without scrolling.

Google's results now look more like a full AI answer — closer to how AI Mode works than how Google has typically shown AI responses within Search.

How It Works

For some queries, Google fully expands the AI Overview response so there's no need to click "Show more."

If users have already begun scrolling to view content below the AI Overview, Google cancels the expansion so the user doesn't lose their reading position.

What Google Said

A Google spokesperson said: "For some queries, AI Overviews may dynamically expand for topics where our systems determine it's most useful for people."

Google added: "Our research has shown that with this dynamic experience, users find Search more helpful and engage deeper in follow-up exploration."

Chris Long, who spotted it first, posted on X: "Holy moly SEOs: Google is now revealing the AI Mode prompt box BY DEFAULT for some queries. This is how Google continues to push AI Mode as the default search experience."

Why It Matters

If you thought AI Overviews take away clicks, wait until this rolls out to your queries. It should lead to fewer and fewer clicks from Google Search.

Google earlier this week added link carousels for developing topics to AI Mode, as it did for AI Overviews. But it's doubtful that helps much for most queries showing a fully expanded answer.

Google did not comment on what percentage of queries this impacts or whether it will expand further over time — though it's reasonable to assume it will. The expectation that AI Mode eventually takes over Google Search has been building, and Google has been taking steps in that direction, including swapping in Gemini 3.8 Flash after just two weeks.

How to Respond

Start by separating where clicks survive from where they don't. Sorting keywords into click, answer-only and community-owned buckets becomes genuinely operational here. Continuing to write thin pages for answer-only queries is now clearly a loss.

And since impressions no longer convert into clicks, you need a baseline that measures citation itself as an outcome. Staying inside the answer and receiving a click have become different jobs.