Google Discover’s Dive deeper shows an AI overview instead of the article

Robby Stein of Google wrote about the test on X: the company, in his words, is "experimenting with a new way to make exploring a topic and discovering related web content easier in Discover".

Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable showed what it looks like in practice.

An overview of the topic instead of the article

A Discover card used to lead straight to the publisher's page. In the test a "Dive deeper" button appears underneath it, and a tap opens a short AI overview of the topic, labelled as generated by artificial intelligence.

Google warns right away that such overviews "can make mistakes". Below the overview a set unfolds: links to the articles the topic was assembled from, and community reactions. A click through to the publisher becomes the second step.

Google is trying it on video first and, judging by the description of the test, will widen it later. Several design variants are promised within the coming weeks.

What happens to recommendation traffic

Schwartz doubts the arrangement will be good for publishers: if the overview gives the full picture, a reader has little reason to go and read the original.

It is the same logic we saw with AI answers in ordinary search, except it now reaches the feed, where people used to choose for themselves what to open. How AI overviews change click-through in the results is covered in detail in our AI Overview guide.

One circumstance makes this test especially sensitive. Discover is a feed without a query: the reader searched for nothing, Google offers the topics itself.

A publisher used to earn the click simply because its headline and image were more interesting than the neighbouring ones. Now there is an intermediary between the card and the article, retelling the topic in its own words and pushing the source lower.

Google keeps the links, and the announcement itself talks about "related web content". But the order of the clicks has changed, and with it, probably, how many people reach the article.

Where to watch in Search Console while the test spreads

For Ukrainian news sites and blogs Discover often accounts for a large share of visits, and the feed runs on its own rules of distribution. We wrote about them in our piece on optimising for Google Discover.

Give it a separate line in your reporting: impressions and CTR specifically from Discover in Search Console, broken down by day. If impressions hold while click-through sinks, that is the first sign the feature has reached your audience.

At the time of publication Google named neither the countries where the test runs nor whether it will work in Ukraine. Which articles end up in the set below the overview, and on what basis they are chosen, is not stated either.

I'd stop there with the conclusions. Any advice on "how to get into Dive deeper" would be invention right now: we know neither the selection criteria nor whether the test will survive to release.

One number interests me — how many people get from "Dive deeper" to the publisher's site. I suspect that is exactly the number Google will not show.

Related reading: Google Discover Optimisation · SEO site audit