Google tests a web-only results button in AI Overviews

Google appears to be building an escape hatch out of AI Overviews. According to industry reports, the company is testing a button inside its AI Overview that sends users straight to a web-only results tab, stripping out AI features and other verticals to show plain web links. After a year of pushing AI answers to the top of Search, a one-tap route back to traditional results would be a notable reversal, and a small opening for the organic clicks AI Overviews have been absorbing.

What happened

The button was spotted in the wild rather than announced. Industry reports describe screenshots, attributed to Sachin Patel, showing an AI Overview with a button that drops the user into Google’s web-only results tab. That tab removes AI search features and other search verticals and shows only standard web search results.

Google has not made any official statement about the test, and there is no documentation or timeline for it. As with any experiment surfaced this way, it may roll out widely, change shape, or disappear.

“A button within its AI Overview in Search that sends users straight to the web-only results tab, which strips out AI search features and other verticals to show plain web links.”

Shopifreaks

Why it matters

For more than a year the direction of travel has been one way: AI Overviews and AI Mode have moved to the front of the results page and absorbed clicks that once went to websites. A visible, one-tap path back to plain links cuts against that, and it would give users who distrust AI summaries a fast way to reach sources directly. If a meaningful share of people use it, the web-results tab becomes a destination worth ranking in again, not a fallback Google has buried.

What this means for multi-location brands

The takeaway is not to chase a test that may vanish, it is to keep both surfaces covered. A brand that ranks well in classic web results and earns citations in AI features is positioned whichever way Google sends its users. The risk is treating AI visibility and traditional ranking as separate programs and underinvesting in one. They draw on the same index and the same content quality, so the work compounds.

For a large estate, that means location and content pages that hold up in plain web results as well as in AI answers. Keep the foundations strong with accurate local business listings, measure where pages surface across both surfaces with location-level insights, and treat ranking in classic results and getting cited in AI as one effort through your generative engine optimization workflow rather than two.

The bottom line

An unconfirmed test is not a strategy shift, but it is a signal: even Google is hedging on how much of Search should be AI. The brands best placed for either outcome are the ones that rank in plain web results and get cited in AI features, because both still pull from the same pages. Build for both, and a button that comes or goes changes very little.