A new study reveals that Google's AI-powered search tools, particularly its "AI Mode," frequently cite and link back to Google's own properties, creating a circular experience for users. An estimated 17% of all citations in AI Mode lead to another Google search result, a three-fold increase over the past year, with the rate being as high as 50% in categories like Entertainment and Travel.
Industry experts criticize this trend, stating it creates frustrating "loops" for users seeking answers and further diverts web traffic away from external publishers towards Google's own ecosystem. They describe a broader shift from a web that sends traffic to external sites to one that "conserves it" within a company's own products.
Google defends the practice, stating some links are intended as shortcuts for exploration and are not meant to replace links to the wider web. The situation reflects ongoing tensions between tech platforms leveraging AI and publishers concerned about declining visitor traffic.
Main Topics: Google's AI search (AI Mode) self-citation trends; impact on web publishers and traffic; industry criticism of user experience; Google's defense of the feature.
Google seems to have a Google addiction. If you click on a hyperlink in Google’s chatbot-style search tool, AI Mode, you are likely to be looped into another Google search, according to a new study from SE Ranking, a search engine optimization company. Currently, Google.com is the most commonly linked site in AI Mode.
Many website owners and publishers have relied heavily on Google Search as their primary source of visitors and have complained about declines in traffic over the past few years as the tech giant has prominently featured generative AI summaries in search results, through AI Overviews and AI Mode. Liz Reid, Google’s head of Search, has previously disputed reports about traffic declines and described AI tools as driving “highly quality clicks” to these sites.
“Even if you're saying that people click on those citations all the time, well, there's nothing to click on, because it just takes you to another Google result,” says Mordy Oberstein, an SEO expert and head of brand at SE Ranking. Currently, an estimated 17 percent of total citations in AI Mode lead back to Google. That’s a three-fold increase over the past year. The second most overall cited website in AI Mode? YouTube, another Google company.
Google’s presence in AI Mode citations is even more pronounced in certain niches. In the links analyzed by SE Ranking, around half of all citations in AI Mode for Entertainment and Travel returned to a Google Search result.
For example, I asked AI Mode what to pay attention to during the 2026 Oscars ceremony, and the in-line hyperlinks for top-contender movies, such as Sinners and One Battle After Another, lead to Google results. In fact, all 17 hyperlinks in this AI Mode output lead to Google results that appear in a sidebar. In addition to the Google links, the output included three buttons that link to third-party sources at the end of the paragraphs.
“Some of the links described in the report are more like shortcuts to help people explore likely follow-up questions and therefore find additional web links,” a Google spokesperson tells WIRED. “They aren’t intended to replace links to the web.” The spokesperson compared these links in AI Mode to other Search features, like ‘People also ask.’
The disruptive rise of social media in the past has sparked heated discussions between Silicon Valley companies seeking to leverage new technologies and publishers worried about potential declines in traffic. Partnership deals between tech companies, such as Google, and publishers were an attempt to adapt to that seismic change.
The idea of Google preferring its own outputs and features is nothing new to the SEO experts WIRED spoke to about the report. “It's a continuing trend with Google,” says Danny Goodwin, the editorial director of Search Engine Land. He noticed Google linking to its own search results more often in AI Overviews last year and isn’t surprised by the news that AI Mode now includes additional self-citations.
Goodwin has experienced the “loops” before firsthand. “Google may think that's great, but I've gone into those loops where I'm trying to find an answer, and the only option is to click on a Google search result that takes me to another search result,” he says. “But, it still doesn't answer my question.” The circular experience of these AI tools is incredibly frustrating, Goodwin says, for users and publishers putting content online.
“The biggest beneficiary of Google's traffic these days is Google,” says Rand Fishkin, a cofounder of the audience research company, SparkToro, and a digital marketing expert. He sees this as part of an overarching trend in which less traffic from search tools and social media sites is going to outside sources. “That's the big shift. Basically, from a web that sends traffic, to a web that conserves it and is zero click.”
Google’s long-term strategy remains murky. If numerous online publishers are muscled out of prominent citations in AI Mode, with preference given to Google’s own sites, the immediate benefit for the company is clear: more people performing more searches, thereby driving more advertising revenue from search.
Some AI companies, like OpenAI, have turned to partnerships with publishers to compensate prominent websites that appear in chatbot results, including WIRED’s parent company Condé Nast. While Google has some deals with news publishers, it does not appear to pay sites for appearing in the outputs of AI Overviews or AI Mode.
Online publishers, which Google pulls data from for its AI summaries, may struggle to stay in business if a large chunk of citations simply circle users back to Google’s sites. “How is that beneficial to the web?” asks Oberstein. When a snake eats its own tail, what’s left behind is a mystery.
Meridiano
