Google Discover is testing a “Dive deeper” button that opens an AI-generated topic overview inside the feed. Tap it and you get a short summary, links to related stories, community reactions, and original reporting pulled together in one view. The test was announced Friday by Robby Stein, VP of Product for Google Search, and starts with video cards. No countries, languages, or audience size were disclosed.
What Does the “Dive Deeper” Button Actually Do?
The button appears beneath a Discover card and, when tapped, opens an overview rather than navigating directly to the source. According to Stein’s announcement, the overview includes “prominent links to related stories, community reactions & original reporting.” Google described the goal as making “exploring a topic and discovering related web content easier in Discover.”
The example shared in the announcement shows a three-screen flow. The first screen is a standard Discover feed with a YouTube weather video from KCRA 3 covering a Northern California heat wave. A short AI-written summary sits below the video, labeled “Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.” The “Dive deeper” button appears directly below that label.
How Does the Three-Screen Flow Work?
Tapping the button opens a second screen with the same video, a longer AI summary, and a horizontal row of source cards, with the first card in the example linking to kcra.com. A third screen, headed “Explore more stories,” groups short AI summaries under sub-topic headlines, each followed by source links and brief descriptions of what each linked article covers.
In practice, publisher links appear at two points inside the overview: as source cards on the second screen and as embedded links within each sub-topic group on the third. Reaching those links requires two taps from the original Discover feed rather than one.
How Does This Fit With Discover’s Existing AI Features?
Google rolled out AI previews for trending topics in Discover in October 2025, initially in the US, South Korea, and India, per Search Engine Journal’s coverage at the time. Those previews expand inline to show more information with links to the web. The “Dive deeper” experiment follows the same structural logic but attaches the overview to a specific card rather than a trending topic, and opens in a separate overlay rather than expanding in place.
Stein said Google will “experiment with multiple designs in the weeks ahead” and that the test currently covers video content only. The announcement gave no timeline for expanding to other content types or regions.
What Can Publishers Actually Measure Right Now?
Search Console added a generative AI performance report for Discover that Google says rolled out to all websites worldwide on August 31, 2026. As of September 18, the report tracks one metric: impressions. An impression is counted when a link to your site is scrolled into view inside a generative AI feature in Discover, with one impression counted per result per session, according to the report’s support documentation.
The report segments data by page, country, and date. It does not break down impressions by which specific AI feature generated them. Impressions from a “Dive deeper” overview, if they are counted at all, would be combined with impressions from all other AI features in Discover. Google’s support documentation also notes that data from experiments running in Search Labs (Google’s opt-in testing environment) is excluded, and Stein’s announcement did not confirm whether “Dive deeper” runs through Search Labs.
What This Means for AI-Search Visibility
Here is the core tension in plain terms: your content might appear inside a “Dive deeper” overview and get an impression counted, but you currently have no way to know whether that drove any clicks, or even which AI feature generated the impression in the first place.
Think of it this way. A reader sees your article linked inside a “Dive deeper” overview on a weather story. Search Console records an impression. But the report does not distinguish that impression from one generated by an AI preview on a trending topic from three days earlier. For any publisher trying to understand what is actually driving results, that is a meaningful blind spot.
Several things are worth tracking as this experiment develops:
- The feature adds a tap between the user and the original source. Whether that extra step reduces click-through compared to a standard Discover card is unknown. Google has not shared data on this.
- The experiment starts with YouTube videos, not text articles. Publishers whose primary Discover traffic comes from written content are not immediately in scope, though the pattern is consistent with Google layering AI summaries across all content types over time.
- The AI summary carries a visible disclaimer (“Generated with AI, which can make mistakes”). Source cards appear prominently in the example design, which suggests the current implementation is structured to link out rather than contain users inside the overview.
- The lack of feature-level measurement in Search Console is a structural limitation that predates this test. It means publishers cannot evaluate the business impact of any single AI feature in Discover independently of the others.
Hingewise’s read: The most underreported issue here is not the “Dive deeper” button itself but the measurement gap it compounds. Publishers are being asked to accept that AI-driven Discover features deliver value, but the only available signal is a single, feature-agnostic impression count with no click data attached. From an AI-search visibility standpoint, impressions alone cannot tell you whether a feature is a gateway that drives traffic or a display surface that satisfies curiosity without ever sending a user to your site. Until Search Console adds click data or feature-level breakdowns for Discover AI features, publishers cannot make that distinction with any confidence.
Checklist: Before the “Dive Deeper” Test Reaches Your Audience
- Confirm your site is opted into Search generative AI features in Search Console settings, a prerequisite for appearing in the Discover AI report at all.
- Check whether your property currently has access to the generative AI performance report for Discover (Google notes rollout is still ongoing and not all properties have it).
- Baseline your current Discover impressions in the standard Discover performance report now, so you have a comparison point if AI feature impression data shifts.
- Identify which of your pages currently drive Discover traffic, particularly video or video-adjacent content, since the test begins with video cards.
- Monitor the Discover AI report’s impression trend after the test expands, keeping in mind the figure combines all AI features, not just “Dive deeper.”
- Watch for any Search Labs opt-in prompt connected to this feature, since Lab status determines whether impressions from the experiment are counted in your report at all.
Google has said it will iterate on the design in the coming weeks. Whether “Dive deeper” expands beyond video content, and whether it eventually earns its own measurement column in Search Console, are the two signals most worth watching.
Sources: Search Engine Journal | Google Search Console Help
Lam Nguyen · Hingewise
This article was drafted with AI assistance from the sources cited above and checked against them before publishing. The "What this means for AI-search visibility" section is Hingewise's editorial analysis, built on the frameworks and positions we use in our GEO work. How we work: Editorial policy.