Google has taken the "Show More" button off AI Overviews. In its place, the company is dynamically expanding AI Overviews for some queries and pushing more searchers into AI Mode by default, according to reporting from Search Engine Roundtable and Search Engine Land. Small interface change, on the surface. But that button was doing quiet, load-bearing work for anyone who reports on search performance, and it is worth being honest about what its absence actually costs.
What the button used to do
"Show More" was never just a UI convenience. It was the one moment in the AI Overview experience where a searcher made a visible choice: expand into more AI-generated content, or scroll past into the ordinary results. That choice was a signal. It told you something about intent that a raw impression could not. Analysts leaned on that distinction, even informally, when they explained why a query showed traffic but no clicks, or why some verticals held up under AI Overviews while others collapsed.
Take the button away and replace it with dynamic expansion, and the choice disappears. The overview simply grows or does not, and the searcher who wanted a quick answer and the searcher who wanted to dig get folded into the same behavior. Google is also nudging more people toward AI Mode directly rather than leaving AI Overviews as a stop on the way to the page. Search Engine Journal's coverage of the Preferred Sources feature is part of the same story: Google is building more structure into how AI surfaces choose and present sources, which is another lever pulled at the platform level, invisible to anyone reading a rank tracker.
A judge asking the question marketers have been avoiding
Search Engine Journal reported that a judge is questioning the fallout from Google's AI and spam update rollout, the kind of scrutiny that usually arrives after enough businesses complain that a change wasn't just disruptive but improperly disclosed or improperly weighed. That's a legal question, not a marketing one, but it rhymes with a marketing question that has been sitting unanswered for a while: if the mechanism that generates a "click" changes underneath a reporting stack, who is responsible for telling clients the number means something different now than it did in the last quarter's deck?
Greg Jarboe's piece on marketing accountability makes the sharper version of this point directly: AI isn't killing accountability, it's exposing who never had any. Agencies and in-house teams that built their reporting on genuinely understood attribution will absorb a change like this by adjusting the model. Teams that were reporting a click-through rate without ever really interrogating what that click represented are the ones who will discover, usually in front of a client, that the number stopped meaning what everyone assumed it meant.
Twenty years of the goalposts moving
None of this is new in kind, even if it is new in degree. Greg Finn's retrospective on twenty years of PPC, from exact match to AI Mode, is a useful reminder that search marketing has always been a discipline of adapting to platform decisions made without the marketer in the room. Match types tightened and loosened. Auction dynamics changed. Reporting interfaces were redesigned around what the platform wanted advertisers to see. The "Show More" button's disappearance sits on that same continuum: another point where the platform's incentives (fewer clicks out, more time in AI-native surfaces) reshape what advertisers can measure, whether or not advertisers asked for the reshaping.
The difference this time is that the change touches organic behavior as much as paid. A PPC team can at least argue its bids and creative in an auction it can see. An SEO team watching AI Overviews expand dynamically has no equivalent lever, and no equivalent visibility into why a given query now surfaces more AI content than it did a month ago.
More leads or better leads, asked with sharper teeth
Search Engine Land's framing of "more leads or better leads" was written as a general optimization question, but it becomes close to unavoidable once a click can no longer be assumed to mean the same thing across queries. A rise in click volume that coincides with the removal of an opt-out button is not obviously good news. It might mean more people are reaching the destination page with less context, having skipped the expanded reasoning the AI Overview would have given them, which changes what a "lead" from that click is worth on the other end. Reporting that treats every click as equivalent, regardless of how much AI-generated content the searcher passed through first, was already a simplification. It's now a simplification that hides a bigger swing.
Old Navy's experience over the summer, rewiring its marketing strategy after a traffic bust, is a useful cautionary example of a brand reacting to a volume change without immediately being able to say why the volume changed. That is the position more search-dependent businesses will find themselves in as platform-level UI decisions ripple into top-of-funnel numbers they don't control and can't fully explain from the outside.
What actually changes in the reporting
- Click-through rate on queries that trigger AI Overviews needs a note attached: the comparison to pre-rollout baselines is no longer apples to apples once the opt-out mechanism itself has changed.
- Any dashboard that segments "AI Overview clicks" versus "organic clicks" should be checked against whether that segmentation still reflects an actual user choice or just an artifact of dynamic expansion.
- Conversion quality from search traffic deserves a second look wherever click volume moved without a matching move in the underlying demand, in the same way Old Navy's team had to look past the top-line traffic number to find out what actually shifted.
None of this means the metric is worthless. It means the metric now needs a sentence next to it explaining what changed and when, the same sentence an honest reporting practice would have attached to every major platform shift over the last twenty years, whether or not anyone actually wrote it down at the time.