Google says disabled source taps on Discover’s AI summary cards were “a bug in a Discover experiment,” and that it has turned the experiment off.
Rajan Patel, VP of Engineering for Search at Google, said so in a reply on X Monday evening. Damien Andell, who researches Google Discover, had reported the issue on Oct. 23.
Before the test, Andell wrote, tapping a summary’s sources opened a feed of articles from those sources, one path from an AI summary to the sites it cites. The morning after Patel’s reply, Andell posted that the experiment had been removed and replaced with another.
What Google Said
Patel was replying to Lily Ray, who had quote-posted Andell’s report the morning of Oct. 23. Patel wrote:
Hey Lily – this was a bug in a Discover experiment. We’ve turned off the experiment, and the experience works as intended again.
The reply doesn’t say what the experiment was testing, how long it ran, or how many people saw the disabled taps.
What Was Reported
Andell wrote on Oct. 23 that Discover was testing an AI summary change that disabled clicks on sources.
He found this test through a flag called “disable_aio_sources_button_tap,” and stated that this flag stopped taps on the sources at the bottom from opening the article feed.
In his two screenshots, Andell is showing a Fox 9 video from YouTube that has appeared in his Discover feed. Each screenshot shows a brief summary underneath the video and a series of icon links below it. The second image circles the icon links and labels them “Sources.”
What Andell Found After Google’s Reply
On Oct. 27, he looked at this again. In a reply on X, he stated:
I just checked and the experiment did indeed remove and replace it with another one called “aio tap falls through to hero”.
His post didn’t explain how the new experiment works or where it is running.
Why This Matters
The Discover generative AI report from Search Console reports how many times users see links to your pages in Discover through the generative AI capabilities. Each source page is listed by URL in the Discover Generative AI Report.
The only metric described in Search Console Help for this report is Impression, which represents when someone sees one of your website’s link(s) via the generative AI in Discover, not a source tap.
Looking Ahead
Until Google or Andell explains the replacement experiment, you can take a quick look for yourself. Tap the sources on an AI summary card in your Discover feed to see whether the article feed opens.
