Google is now placing Top Stories carousels directly inside AI Overviews (Google’s AI-generated answer summaries that appear above all other results), not as a separate module below them. Data published by NewzDash in July 2026 shows this embedded layout appears in 15.5% of trending news queries in the U.S. and 17.46% in the UK. The opt-out most publishers are already using does not stop it.
What Is Actually Changing in Google’s Search Results?
Until recently, AI Overviews and Top Stories were separate. The AI answer appeared at the top; the news carousel ran independently below it. According to NewzDash CEO John Shehata, Google has started merging them: the Top Stories carousel now appears embedded inside the AI Overview itself. When it does, Google no longer shows a standalone carousel below it for the same query. The two placements are mutually exclusive.
Writing about Shehata’s findings in Search Engine Journal, Greg Jarboe frames this as a new instance of “Vertical Creep”, a pattern he traces to a 2006 panel he shared with Shehata at the Search Engine Strategies New York conference, where both discussed how Google was quietly folding Google News content into its main web results before Universal Search formally arrived. In May 2007, Google’s “Universal Search” update blended news, video, images, and books into a single ranked list instead of 10 blue links. Danny Sullivan called that rollout the most radical change Google had ever shipped to its results. Nearly two decades later, the destination is no longer a blended results page. It is a generated answer.
Which Query Categories Are Most Affected?
NewzDash’s tracking shows entertainment queries lead the adoption of this embedded format in both markets. World News follows at nearly 32% in the U.S. Health and Science queries barely register. The 15.5% U.S. and 17.46% UK figures represent the share of trending news queries where Google already shows Top Stories at all.
- Entertainment: 35% (U.S.), 31.5% (UK)
- World News: ~32% (U.S.)
- Health and Science: minimal in both markets
- Overall penetration (trending news queries): 15.5% (U.S.), 17.46% (UK)
Source: NewzDash, July 2026.
Does Blocking Google-Extended Actually Opt You Out of AI Overviews?
No. This is the central misunderstanding Shehata flags, and it is widespread. Google-Extended is a robots.txt directive (an instruction publishers put in a file on their site to tell crawlers what they can or cannot access) that governs specified AI training and grounding uses, such as feeding future Gemini models. Google’s own crawler documentation states explicitly that blocking Google-Extended does not affect a site’s inclusion in Google Search. It does not remove a publisher from AI Overviews, AI Mode, standard Top Stories, or Top Stories embedded inside an AI Overview.
Shehata describes this as the default assumption across the industry, not a fringe misunderstanding. Publishers who blocked Google-Extended believing they had opted out of AI Overviews have not.
What Control Actually Reaches AI Overviews?
Google began testing a separate generative AI exclusion setting inside Search Console in June 2026, currently limited to a subset of UK site owners. Unlike the Google-Extended robots.txt block, this setting targets AI Overviews, AI Mode, and generative Discover features specifically, without affecting traditional search eligibility. According to Google’s support documentation cited by Shehata, excluded content will not appear in those features and will not even be used as an input when generating a response.
Shehata’s interpretation, which he labels a high-confidence inference rather than a documented outcome, is that choosing this exclusion would also forfeit a publisher’s position in the embedded Top Stories carousel inside AI Overviews, since that carousel lives on one of the covered surfaces. What Google does at the layout level in response, whether it keeps showing an embedded carousel built from opted-in publishers or falls back to a standalone Top Stories module, has not been confirmed by Google.
What This Means for AI-Search Visibility
Here is the simplest way to understand what is at stake: a publisher’s Top Stories link is now sometimes part of the AI answer itself, not a separate result sitting below it. If you opt out of AI Overviews, you may not just lose an AI citation. You may lose your Top Stories placement entirely for that query.
That changes the opt-out calculation significantly. Many publishers have been framing the choice as “AI Overviews versus traditional search.” NewzDash’s data suggests the choice is increasingly “AI Overviews including Top Stories versus no placement in that position at all.” The two surfaces are no longer fully separate decisions.
From a Hingewise analysis standpoint, the more consequential signal here is structural. The embedded Top Stories format brings named publishers, real bylines, and direct links inside the generated answer. As Jarboe notes, this is the first move in the AI Overview era that appears aimed at the trust problem in AI-generated search results, giving users a visible, attributable source rather than synthesized text with no clear origin. That is a meaningful distinction.
One pattern worth monitoring, and this is a Hingewise inference the source data does not explicitly address: if this embedded format expands beyond entertainment and world news into more commercially competitive categories, the share of attention (how often a specific publisher or brand appears in AI-generated results) would shift toward traditional editorial credibility signals rather than the content authority signals that have historically favored brand-led publishing. Whether that shift materializes at meaningful scale depends on how far Google extends this layout. The current data does not confirm it will, but the directional logic holds.
Jarboe’s broader point stands: Google has not documented what happens to layout when publishers opt out. That ambiguity works against the trust this move is supposed to build. A step toward attributable AI answers is not a finished solution.
Before You Touch Any Opt-Out Setting: A Quick Checklist
- Audit your robots.txt: does your site currently block Google-Extended, and do you know exactly what surfaces it covers?
- Check Search Console to see if your property has access to the generative AI exclusion setting (as of June 2026, limited to a subset of UK site owners).
- Document which controls govern which surfaces before making any change. Treating Google-Extended and the Search Console exclusion as interchangeable is how a site forfeits AI Overview visibility while believing it only opted out of training data.
- If you have access to the Search Console exclusion, test it on a URL-prefix property or a single section first, not sitewide. Google’s control supports inheritance between parent and child properties, so a scoped trial is possible.
- Pull Google’s generative AI performance reports in Search Console and pair them with a tracking tool (Shehata uses NewzDash) that separates Top Stories appearances embedded inside AI Overviews from standalone carousel appearances.
- Establish a baseline before flipping any setting. You cannot evaluate the tradeoff without knowing how much visibility is currently coming through each placement.
Google has not published a timeline for expanding the Search Console generative AI exclusion beyond its current UK test group, or for clarifying layout behavior when publishers opt out. Both questions remain open as of August 2026. Until Google provides that documentation, NewzDash’s ongoing query-level tracking is, as Jarboe notes, the closest thing the industry has to ground truth on this specific behavior.
Lam Nguyen · Hingewise
Sources: Search Engine Journal, Greg Jarboe, July 2026 (searchenginejournal.com/what-top-stories-inside-ai-overviews-means-for-publishers-and-brands-in-2026-and-beyond/584175/); NewzDash SEO for News blog and LinkedIn, John Shehata, July 2026; Google Search Central crawler documentation.