Google keeps moving the AI Overview citation box. The lever that earns one has not moved.

On 28 September 2026, SEO consultant Glenn Gabe spotted Google testing a new AI Overview layout: citations stacked in a block beneath the answer, with the dedicated citation bar removed from the right side of the page entirely. Search Engine Roundtable reported the test the next day, noting Google has tried a similar layout at least twice before, in March 2026 and in September 2025.

None of that changes whether your page is eligible to be cited in the first place. Our own August 2026 audit found six levers that move AI citation: crawlability, correct delivery, structure, schema, freshness and original data. A citation card moving from the right rail to the bottom of the page touches none of them.

What actually changed on 28 September

Google rearranged where citations display inside an AI Overview, not which pages qualify to be cited or how many sources appear for a given answer.

Gabe's test showed the right-hand citation bar removed entirely, with sources instead stacked in a block beneath the generated answer and a ‘show all’ control to expand the full list, per Search Engine Roundtable's account. The inline hover links inside the answer text stayed exactly where they were.

This is a display experiment running on a slice of desktop traffic, the kind Google runs constantly and does not always ship. Search Engine Roundtable's own coverage points to at least two earlier attempts at a similar bottom-stacked layout, one in March 2026 and one in September 2025, and neither became the permanent design.

Why the SEO industry keeps reacting to this anyway

A citation layout change is visible and easy to screenshot, which makes it easy to mistake for a change in what earns a citation, and it is not the same thing.

Every time Google tests a citation layout, trade coverage treats the position of the card as though it predicts click-through rate, and it might, modestly. But click-through on a citation that already exists is a different question from whether your content made it into the citation set to begin with, and the second question is the one that decides whether you show up in an AI answer at all.

Confusing the two leads to the wrong audit: checking how a page would look inside a wider or narrower citation panel, instead of checking whether an AI crawler can read the page’s structured answer at all. We covered that more basic failure mode in why a misconfigured content type header makes perfect HTML invisible to AI crawlers, a problem no citation UI test touches either way.

What Search Console still will not tell you

Google’s own generative AI performance report shows impressions only, so no citation layout test is actually measurable inside the one dashboard built for this job.

Search Console’s generative AI performance report finished rolling out to every website worldwide on 31 August 2026, according to Google’s own Search Central blog. Google’s help documentation for the report lists impressions, pages, countries, devices and dates as the available dimensions. It does not list clicks or CTR among them.

That means even if the bottom-stacked layout does change click-through, as some commentary following the 28 September test has speculated, there is no first-party way to measure it inside Search Console. Our AI Search Attribution Handbook is built around that exact gap: tracking referral sessions in GA4 rather than waiting on a metric Google has not shipped.

What to check instead of watching Google’s layout tests

Run your audit against the six levers that decide citation eligibility, not against whichever citation layout happens to be live this week.

• Confirm the content type header your server sends on your highest value pages. A page serving the wrong header is invisible to AI crawlers no matter where Google later draws the citation box, the specific failure we traced in this audit.
• Check that your structured data actually validates, the schema lever, rather than confirming a JSON-LD block merely exists on the page.
• Work through our step by step GEO audit checklist rather than building a new one around a layout screenshot.
• Treat llms.txt the way we set out in why llms.txt does not earn citations: it does nothing for citation eligibility, and neither does the position of the citation card.

Our take

Google will keep testing where the citation card sits, because a display test is cheap and reversible, and it has now tried a version of this at least three times without settling on one. Our view is that tracking the next version of this test is a reasonable job for an SEO newsletter and a poor use of an operator’s attention. The six levers in our own audit, crawlability, correct delivery, structure, schema, freshness and original data, decide whether you are in the citation set long before Google decides where to draw the box around it. Spend the hour there, not refreshing a test you cannot opt into and could not act on if you could.