Google has updated its AI-powered search experience to pull in advice and perspectives from Reddit, social media, and other online discussion forums. The move reflects how users increasingly turn to community knowledge when searching online.
The company announced five new updates to its AI Mode and AI Overviews features on May 6, with the most notable change being the inclusion of firsthand community voices directly within search results. AI responses will now include a preview of perspectives from public online discussions, social media, and other firsthand sources. Google is also adding more context to these links, like a creator’s name, handle, or community name, to help users decide which discussions they might want to read or participate in.
For example, if a user wants to research how to take great pictures of the northern lights, they might see quotes from a photography forum offering advice on exposure time, along with clickable links—featuring the specific community name—so they can jump to the full conversation.
“For many searches, people are increasingly seeking out advice from others,” Google explained in its official blog post. The trend is well established—it is common for users to append Reddit to a Google search query when they want a human, experience-based answer rather than a curated article or a brand website.
The update is part of a broader redesign of how Google surfaces links in its generative AI features. Other changes include suggestions for further reading at the end of AI responses, linking to in-depth articles on different facets of a topic, highlights for links from a user’s news subscriptions, more inline links placed next to relevant text within AI responses, and desktop hover previews that show a website’s name or page title before a user clicks
To address concerns over source reliability, Google is also adding more contextual information to cited links. This is similar to how ChatGPT or Claude sometimes provides links intended to back up their claims, TechCrunch reported. The idea is to help users make a more informed decision about whether to click through and investigate further.
The subscription highlights feature adds another layer of trust. In early testing, Google found that people were significantly more likely to click links that were labelled as coming from their own subscriptions. Publishers who want to enable this can link their subscriptions with Google through a developer form.
Google said it continues to enhance how it shows and ranks links in its generative AI search experiences, using techniques like query fan-out, which helps it dive deeper into the web to find the most relevant sites for a given search.
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