Nobody Asked to Skip the Links

Google has taken away the "Show More" button that used to appear under AI Overviews. That button did one small thing: it let a searcher decide, after seeing the AI summary, that they wanted to keep going past it. Now that choice is gone, and in its place searchers are being moved toward AI Mode instead. At the same time, AI Overviews themselves are expanding, showing up for more queries than before. And in a separate courtroom, a judge is asking questions about what Google's AI rollout and its recent spam updates have actually done to the market it sits on top of.

These aren't three unrelated news items from the same week. They're the same story told in three places at once: a company being asked in court whether it holds too much power over what people find online, while in its own product it quietly removes the one control that let users opt out of its preferred answer format.

A button is a small thing, until it's the only thing

The "Show More" button was never a big feature. It sat under the AI Overview, unremarkable, doing one job: giving people who didn't want the summary a way past it. Search Engine Roundtable's reporting on its removal frames the change plainly, Google AI Overviews are pushing searchers into AI Mode and the Show More button has dropped away. That's the whole mechanism. There was a door. Now there isn't.

Nobody campaigned for this. There was no visible demand to remove a button that cost nothing to keep and gave users one more way to route around an AI answer they didn't ask for. The absence of complaint isn't the same as consent, it's just what happens when a change is made somewhere users don't get to vote on it.

Expansion and removal are the same decision

Search Engine Land has reported that Google is dynamically expanding AI Overviews for some queries, meaning more searches now surface the AI summary first, before a user reaches anything resembling a traditional list of links. Read that next to the Show More removal and the shape of the policy becomes obvious. It isn't two separate product tweaks. It's one direction: more AI Overview, fewer ways to get past it.

A company can frame that as improving relevance. It can also, just as accurately, be described as narrowing the exits. Both things describe the same rollout. The question is which one a court finds persuasive.

The courtroom question this makes concrete

Search Engine Journal's Matt Southern reported that a judge is asking pointed questions about the fallout from Google's AI rollout and its spam update, in a piece that ties recent search changes directly to ongoing legal scrutiny of the company's market conduct. Courts move slowly and carefully, weighing evidence about dominance, harm and intent. Meanwhile Google's product team moves at the pace product teams move at, shipping interface changes in the weeks and months while the legal question is still being argued.

That mismatch matters. A judge might eventually decide that Google's control over search results constitutes an abuse of market power. But by the time that ruling lands, the "Show More" button will have been gone for however long it's been gone, and however many searchers who might have clicked it will already have been routed into AI Mode instead. The market fact arrives well ahead of the legal finding. Whatever the court eventually decides, it will be deciding about a product that no longer exists in the form it's judging.

What publishers are being handed instead

Search Engine Journal has also covered a "Preferred Sources" button that site owners can add, a mechanism that lets a website signal something back to Google about how it wants to be treated in these AI-driven results. It's a real feature and worth understanding on its own terms. But it's aimed at publishers, not searchers. It doesn't restore the option that just disappeared for the person typing the query. A site can ask to be treated as a preferred source inside an AI Overview; a user still can't easily ask to skip the AI Overview altogether and go straight to a source list.

That asymmetry is the point worth sitting with. Google is building out more controls for the entities whose content feeds AI Overviews, at the same moment it's removing controls for the people reading them. One side of that relationship is gaining levers. The other side just lost one.

Why this is the real test, not the courtroom

Market power cases are usually argued in the abstract, market share percentages, evidence of intent, expert testimony about substitutability. Those arguments matter, but they're slow and they're contested at every step. A removed button is neither. It's a fact that exists the moment it ships. Nobody has to prove that searchers wanted a way past AI Overviews, the button already answered that question by existing, and Google already answered it back by taking the button away.

If the argument in front of the judge is about whether Google exercises outsized control over how people find information online, the company's own product decisions this month are supplying the evidence in real time. A search engine that used to offer an exit and now doesn't isn't a neutral design choice sitting outside that argument. It's the argument, already decided, already live, while the court is still asking its questions.