What’s Up THIS WEEK?! HUGE Google AI Overview Change! Simple Prompt to Show Up Everywhere! 🥊 Rocky? Jaws? | Ep. 531

Google just made it nearly impossible to tell when your website traffic is coming from AI Overviews, and that shift is forcing marketers to rethink how they track—and earn—visibility in AI search results. That was the dominant theme of this week's episode of Do This, NOT That, which also covered a new LinkedIn feature, a fast-moving Kraft marketing stunt, and trouble at prediction market Polymarket.

Google AI Overviews: The Tracking Blind Spot

The biggest development is a quiet but consequential change to how Google handles links inside AI Overviews. Previously, when a user clicked a link within an AI Overview, Google appended a tracking code called a "scroll to text fragment" to the URL—a long string ending with a #:~:text= marker. That code let marketers identify traffic coming specifically from AI Overviews in their analytics dashboards.

Google recently redesigned the AI Overview interface, moving links from side panels directly into the body of the AI-generated text. With that design shift, the tracking code disappeared. According to reporting from Search Engine Journal and discussions in the Google Analytics Reddit community, over 90% of the AI Overview traffic that was previously trackable is now invisible. Marketers can no longer see which content is driving clicks from AI Overviews, making it much harder to optimize for that channel.