AI Mode's new link cards show a name, an image and a date. Here's what controls each one

For most of AI Mode's short life, a link to your site was a blue word in a paragraph. That's changing. On October 15, Google announced a batch of updates meant to send more people to websites from its AI answers. On October 26, Search Engine Watch spotted another test that makes links look less like footnotes and more like cards.

Whether these changes send a food or beauty brand meaningful traffic is a separate question, and one we've been skeptical about. What's clear is that Google is pulling more of a page's identity into the answer: its name, its icon, an image and a date. Each of those comes from somewhere, and on many CPG sites at least one of them is broken.

What Google changed, and what it's testing

Google's post by Hema Budaraju, VP of product management, listed five changes across AI Mode and AI Overviews:

• More inline links, which Google says it has increased substantially, now shown higher up in responses more often.
• A test of a dedicated section at the top of some responses for "official places on the web to complete a specific task," with context on why each link is useful.
• Prominent news carousels expanding to more locations and languages, highlighting a user's Preferred Sources. Google said the number of people using Preferred Sources had grown more than 7x since the start of the year.
• Links at the end of some responses getting image thumbnails and "a more clickable design."
• Clickable creator and publisher names on video results that link to Search profiles.

Then Search Engine Watch's Sachin Patel described a "Further exploration" heading in AI Mode with websites listed under it. Each result shows the site name as a blue link, a line of text, an image on the right and a date underneath. Patel wrote that he couldn't tell what the date meant: publish date, last updated date, or when Google last indexed the page. He also noted it resembles an earlier AI Mode link design with a larger bold link, a favicon and a URL.

So the card, as reported, has five parts. Google hasn't published documentation on how AI Mode fills any of them. But regular Google Search has a documented control for each, and that's the sensible place to start.

The parts of a link card and what controls them

Card element	Where it was reported	Google's documented control in Search
Site name	Further exploration (SEW)	WebSite structured data on the home page; Google also reads og:site_name, the title and headings
Favicon	Earlier AI Mode link design (SEW)	A favicon link tag on the home page, crawlable by Googlebot and Googlebot-Image
Line of text	Further exploration (SEW)	Automated; title and meta description influence it in regular snippets
Image	Further exploration (SEW); end-of-answer links (Google)	primaryImageOfPage, an image on the main entity, or og:image
Date	Further exploration (SEW)	Visible labeled date plus datePublished and dateModified in structured data

One honest caveat before the details: it's our assumption, not Google's statement, that AI Mode cards draw on the same signals. It seems a reasonable default, since the earlier AI Mode design already used a favicon and site name, but we'll update this if Google says otherwise.

Site name

Google's site name documentation says site name selection is automated, takes into account the home page and references to it around the web, and that WebSite structured data on the home page is the most important way to state a preference. Google also considers og:site_name, the title element and headings.

For CPG brands, the usual problem is a site name that's really a tagline ("Clean Snacks for Real Life") or a legal name ("Brightfield Foods, Inc."). Google's own example is to use "Google," not "Google, Inc." If your brand is the product name, use the product name. You can also list alternate names for the system to consider.

Favicon

The favicon documentation is short and strict. One favicon per hostname. It has to be square, at least 8x8 pixels, and Google recommends larger than 48x48. Googlebot has to be able to crawl the home page, including following redirects, and Googlebot-Image has to be able to crawl the favicon file, so robots.txt can't block either. The URL should be stable. Supported formats include ICO, PNG, GIF, JPEG and a few others.

Two CPG setups worth checking against those rules: a store on one hostname and a brand site on another, with the favicon referenced on only one of them (Google wants one per hostname), and a favicon served from a path that robots.txt blocks for image crawlers. Both take minutes to fix.

Image

Google's image documentation says choosing a preview image is completely automated, but you can state a preference three ways: the schema.org primaryImageOfPage property, an image property attached to the page's main entity, or the og:image tag. The same page lists the rules: pick a relevant, representative image, avoid generic images like your logo, avoid images with text on them, avoid extreme aspect ratios, and use high resolution where possible.

That rules out the og:image setup on a lot of brand sites, where every page shares the logo or a promo banner with "20% off" written on it. For a product page, the best candidate is usually a clean pack shot. For a recipe or how-to post, the finished dish. Alt text still matters for the image itself; our alt-text tip covers that.

Date

This is the element Patel couldn't explain, and the one most likely to look wrong. Google's byline-date guidance says Google uses several factors to work out a page's date and doesn't rely on one. Its recommendations:

• Show a visible date on the page, labeled clearly, for example "Published" or "Last updated."
• Use datePublished and dateModified in Article or BlogPosting structured data.
• Keep the visible date and the structured data consistent.
• Don't use future dates, or the date of something the page describes rather than the page itself.
• Minimize other prominent dates on the page so Google doesn't pick the wrong one.

Recipe pages, product launches and seasonal guides are where this goes wrong for CPG. A pumpkin bread recipe written in 2021 and lightly edited every September might show 2021, the last edit, or the "Best by October 31" promo date in the sidebar. If the card shows a date, you'd like it to be the right one. The freshness tip has more on updating pages honestly, which means changing the date only when the content changed.

A 30-minute check for a brand site

We'd run this on the home page and three or four high-value pages: the best-selling product, a top recipe or how-to, and a category page.

1. Search Google for your brand and look at the site name and favicon on your home page result. If either is wrong in regular Search, assume it's wrong in AI Mode too.
2. View the home page source. Confirm WebSite structured data with your real brand name, and a favicon link tag pointing to a square image on a stable URL.
3. Check robots.txt for anything that blocks the favicon path or the image CDN for Googlebot-Image.
4. On each high-value page, check og:image. If it's the logo or a banner with text, replace it with a representative image. Add primaryImageOfPage or an image on the main entity if you use structured data, which our schema tip walks through.
5. On articles and recipes, confirm there's one visible, labeled date and that datePublished and dateModified match it.
6. Look for stray dates: promo end dates, copyright years in large type, event dates. Make them less prominent, or at least not formatted like a publish date.

What this does and doesn't buy you

Getting these elements right doesn't make AI Mode choose your page for a card. Google decides which links to show based on the question, and the card is only the presentation. And in the field experiment we covered in our post on AI Mode and clicks, AI Mode cut the share of searches leading to a click on an outside site by 18.8 percentage points, so even good links compete for fewer clicks. If the answer is about your product, being described correctly in the text matters more than the thumbnail next to someone else's link. XENA Intelligence, which scores how products come up when shoppers ask assistants like Gemini and ChatGPT, and similar tools can show you whether you're named in the first place.

But presentation isn't nothing. A card with the right name, a clean icon, a real product photo and an accurate date looks like an official source. A card with "Home" as the site name, a gray globe and a 2019 date looks abandoned. Google is plainly testing which links people click, and the ones that look trustworthy will win some of those tests.

The official websites test is the one to watch

Of everything in the October 15 post, the "official websites" section matters most for brands. Google describes it as a place for the "one or two official places on the web to complete a specific task or get the exact info you need," with context about why each link is useful. For a CPG brand, that could be the store locator, the recall notice, the allergen page or the subscription login. Those pages tend to be the most neglected on a brand site, often a bare template with a generic title. It costs little to make sure they have clear titles, a short description of what the page does, and the same site name and favicon as everything else.

We'll keep checking AI Mode for the Further exploration block and report if the date turns out to be one of the documented fields. If you'd rather not check by hand, tools that save the full answer text, SearchPanel among them, make it easier to see which of your pages an assistant actually links to over time.