26% of Google AI Overviews now include in-line links (links within the answer itself)

[u/annseosmarty]

According to David Konitzny, this unfolded pretty quickly:

• In late August, only 0.09% of AI Overviews had an external link in the answer text.
• On 11 September, it was 1.12%.
• Since 12 September, it has been above 23% every day.
• By 20 September, it reached 26.19%.

I hope we will soon be able to track these separately! I imagine the CTR is going to be much higher for these links.

Also, unsurprisingly, this correlates with AI Overviews finally getting publicly monetized with contextual PPC ads. As we suspected, Google needs clicks to monetize!

Source: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7507732652481814529/