Google adds ‘Web’ search filter for showing old-school text links as AI rolls out

As Google revamps itself for the AI era, offering AI overviews inside its search results, the corporate is introducing a brand new approach to filter for just text-based links. With the brand new “Web” filter that appears at the highest of the outcomes page, users will find a way to filter for text links the way in which they’ll today filter for images, video, news or shopping.

The news was announced on Tuesday via a post on X amid the corporate’s developer conference, Google I/O, where the corporate introduced a large change to Google with the news of AI-organized search results and AI overviews in search, amongst other things.

In keeping with Google, the brand new “Web” filter will appear either at the highest of the outcomes page or as a part of the “More” option, depending in your query.

The launch is an admission that sometimes people will want to only surface text-based links to web pages — the classic blue links that today are sometimes of secondary importance as Google either answers the query in its informational Knowledge Panels or, now, through AI experiments.

Notes the Google SearchLiaison X account, “We’ve added this after hearing from some that there are occasions once they’d prefer to only see links to web pages of their search results, resembling in the event that they’re in search of longer-form text documents, using a tool with limited web access, or those that just prefer text-based results shown individually from search features,” the post read. “In case you’re in that group, enjoy!”

Google also clarified that on mobile devices, it can default to showing the brand new “Web” filter alongside the opposite filters, without requiring users to go to the “More” menu. Meanwhile, on desktop, Google will show the filters that appear most relevant to the search results.

The feature can be rolling out today and tomorrow to global users, said Google.

The news of a “Web” filter will likely cause some debate, particularly among the many search engine marketing crowd, which has historically worked to optimize their links to seem on the primary page of Google Search results for a certain term. But this form of search engine marketing manipulation has arguably also caused Google to be much less useful than within the early days, when its PageRank algorithm wasn’t being gamed by search experts.

The move can be a giant bet that the long run of search won’t necessarily be surfacing links to web sites. Somewhat, the answers a user seeks could also be other types of content, and even AI responses with sources cited for those concerned with digging in further. How all these changes will play out across industries that depend on clicks and visitors stays to be seen.

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