Google has redesigned the links inside its AI-generated answers so that readers see them more clearly, according to a report from Digital Trends. The change touches the most contested surface in search today: AI Overviews, where Google summarizes answers and decides how prominently to credit the publishers behind them.

What the report states is narrow and specific. The links themselves are becoming harder to miss. What the report does not state matters just as much. Google has not published data showing whether these more visible links send more visitors to publisher sites.

What changed in the AI answers?

Google formats its AI Overviews with source attribution attached to generated text. The redesign, as Digital Trends describes it, pushes those source links into a more prominent visual position. Readers who previously had to hunt for citations should now encounter them directly.

This is an interface change, not a ranking change. It does not alter which sites Google's systems select as sources. It alters how visible those selections are once the system has made them.

The takeaway: Google changed the packaging, not the machinery underneath it.

Why the referral traffic question stays open

The second half of the report is a gap, and the headline names it plainly. Referral traffic from AI Overviews remains, in the words of Digital Trends, "a mystery."

That gap has real consequences for publishers. Sites across news, e-commerce and information verticals have reported volatile click-through patterns since Google expanded AI Overviews, yet Google has not released a breakdown of how many clicks the feature sends to cited domains. Without that disclosure, no publisher can verify whether the new link prominence repairs or merely repaints a traffic decline.

The takeaway: better-looking links are a promise of traffic, not evidence of it.

Confirmed versus unconfirmed

Separating what is established from what is not:

• Confirmed by the report: Google has made links in AI answers more visually prominent.
• Confirmed by the report: Referral traffic figures from these answers have not been disclosed.
• Not established: Whether the redesign increases outbound clicks to publisher sites.
• Not established: Any rollout date, market scope, or measured traffic delta.

Digital Trends did not attach numbers, dates or sample sizes to the redesign. Any traffic claims circulating beyond the report should be treated as tool-signal speculation until Google publishes its own analytics.

The takeaway: one fact is on the table; the decisive number is not.

What to watch next

Monitor Google's own announcements for AI Overviews analytics in Search Console, and watch independent click-tracking studies for the first post-redesign measurements. Until either arrives, the honest position is that the visibility of links has improved and the visibility of data has not.