Official links at the top, as a test for now
On 15 October Google announced two changes to AI Mode and AI Overviews on its blog. The first is a test. For tasks that can only be done in one or two official places on the web, those links are to appear in a dedicated section at the top of the answer, each with a sentence on why the link helps. The second is rolling out now, and with it links in the text of the answer appear more often and higher up.
The post leaves open which countries either change applies to. What Google counts as an official place also remains open. For a business, its own website is the obvious candidate, for instance when someone wants to book a table or an appointment. For that, the website has to offer it and be clearly recognisable as the business's own, with name, address and service as in the Google profile.
AI-written text checked by hand before it goes live
Google's guidance on AI-generated content, last updated on 7 October, is clear on one point: all AI-generated content should be checked manually for accuracy and trustworthiness before it is published. The next sentence reaches into parts of the page you hardly see in the browser, because the check also covers metadata such as title elements, meta descriptions, structured data and image alt text that can appear in search results.
The guidance is addressed to the person who publishes. For a business, a second read pays off most for phone number, opening hours, prices and place names, because a mistake there costs real calls and real journeys.
The September spam update is complete
According to Google's status page, the “September 2026 spam update” ran from 24 September to 8 October, globally and in all languages. If you saw fluctuations in Search Console during that time, this is a likely place to start. A spam update hits pages that violate Google's spam policies. If your site lost visibility for good afterwards, it is worth reading those policies once. A shorter spam update already ran in August, from 18 to 21 August.
AI Overviews on searches for your own name
On 2 October Ahrefs published how often Google shows an AI Overview for searches on a brand name. On 29 September it was 82.91 percent of US desktop results, and 73.3 percent on average for September, up from 65.1 percent in August. In a sample of 100 global brands, 63 brand-name searches had such an overview at the end of September, 48 of them in position one. There are no figures for Germany.
For a business, that makes a quick self-test worthwhile. If you search for your own name and find an AI Overview at the top, it shows what the web says about your business. If something there is wrong, your own website and your Google profile are among the first places to check.
What this means for a local business
Google wants AI answers to link more often to the places where something can be done, and at the same time expects a person to check what those pages say. For a local website that means two things. Booking, appointments or enquiries should be possible directly on your own site, and every sentence with figures in it deserves one manual read, even if an AI wrote it.
If you want to keep your website out of Google's AI answers, Search Console has offered a setting for that since 31 August. Why that is rarely the right choice for a local business is in the update to our note on the AI report.