One vendor's data says Google AI Overviews are linking out more often

Google's AI Overviews are showing far more external links than they did earlier this year, according to a chart one vendor posted on X that nobody else has yet corroborated.

Malte Landwehr, founder of Peec AI, posted the data and said his company's tracker shows Google "massively increased the number of external links within AI Overview answers." The chart plots the share of AI Overviews containing at least one external link moving from close to 0% up to over 25%.

Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable wrote up the chart and flagged his own doubt about it. He said the jump "doesn't feel right" to him, since most of what he has reported this year has pointed to Google linking out less. He also disclosed a small personal investment in Peec AI and said he has told the company he would cover its content less often because of that stake.

What the chart does not show

• How many AI Overviews were sampled

• What time period the close-to-0%-to-25% move covers

• Which query types or verticals are included

Peec AI is currently the only source for these numbers. No independent tracker has published a matching figure.

That matters because the case most AEO and SEO trackers have built over the past year runs the other direction: Google keeps the click, and a citation in an AI Overview rarely sends meaningful referral traffic. If Peec AI's chart holds up, it reverses that pattern rather than adjusting it at the margin.

It has not held up yet. One vendor's chart, posted without a sample size or a date range, and written up by a reporter who has disclosed a financial stake in that vendor, is a data point worth watching. It is too early to treat it as a confirmed shift. The number worth publishing here is the one Search Engine Roundtable actually gives: close to 0% moving to over 25%. What the chart would need to make that number trustworthy, a stated sample, a stated window, a second tracker showing the same shift, is still missing.