The google.com/goto link wrapper does reach AI Overviews, and AI Overviews is where it bites hardest, which turns yesterday's open question into a defect to fix rather than a thing to watch.

DataForSEO sells SERP data through an API, so this post exists to reassure its customers and should be read as self-interested. What it discloses is still the first quantified answer anyone has published. It says it now returns direct destination URLs for organic results on 99.99 percent of SERPs, with "only 0.01% of SERPs returned through our API may contain at least one unresolved goto URL for organic elements." The remaining trouble is concentrated elsewhere, and it names the features: 52.26 percent in AI Overviews, 25.1 percent in the local pack, 0.39 percent in featured snippets. Verbatim: "The most significant remaining impact is concentrated in AI Overviews, and our developers are actively working to resolve goto URLs in this and other affected SERP features."

Read the number honestly. It measures DataForSEO's own unresolved backlog on one date through one pipeline, not Google's wrapping rate. But a goto URL cannot go unresolved unless Google wrapped it first, so the qualitative finding is settled: AI Overview citation links are being wrapped, and 52.26 percent is a floor on how often, not an estimate of it. AI Mode is not mentioned in the post, so that surface stays unanswered.

For some queries the AI Overview no longer shows a truncated answer with a "Show more" button. It opens at full length, which pushes the classic results further down and makes the result page look much more like AI Mode. Google confirmed it with a spokesperson, verbatim: "For some queries, AI Overviews may dynamically expand for topics where our systems determine it's most useful for people." Google added: "Our research has shown that with this dynamic experience, users find Search more helpful and engage deeper in follow-up exploration." This is a confirmed rollout rather than a test. Google has not said what share of queries is affected, or whether that share will grow.

Method, published in detail: 7,990 local service queries split roughly evenly between the two surfaces (3,992 AI Overviews, 3,998 AI Mode), 86,645 citation references classified, 25,898 unique cited pages crawled, 50 US metros, 10 verticals including plumbers, roofers, HVAC, electricians, dentists and personal injury lawyers, collected over a few days in August 2026. Steady Demand is a local SEO agency and therefore self-interested, but the method is stated rather than implied and this is the largest sample this radar has carried on the two Google surfaces side by side.

AI Overviews surfaced on 48.8 percent of all queries tested, but only 21.8 percent of the local-intent ones and 75.8 percent of the informational ones. AI Mode answered 100 percent of what it was given. On local-intent queries, 73.5 percent of AI Overviews citations pointed at business websites. On the same intent in AI Mode, only 19.7 percent did, while 79.8 percent pointed at Google Maps and Business Profile data. Fisher's summary: "For 'near me'-style searches, 8 in 10 of AI Mode's citations point to Google's own Maps data, not the business's website." One more figure worth keeping: 95.5 percent of business-site citations pointed at the exact domain Google itself lists as official, leaving 4.5 percent that did not.

Method: 107 million AI answers across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, in three industries only, being IT and solutions services, consumer goods, and communication services. The author is COO and co-founder of Trendos, the vendor that produced the data, which the article discloses. Community and user-generated sources took 51, 50 and 50 percent of the top ten citation sources per engine across the three. Verbatim: "Reddit lands in the top three citation sources for every one of the three industries, and it is the single most cited source in more than half of those cases."