Google Spotted Showing AI-Written Summaries in Citation Cards

Citation cards that appear alongside or below Google's AI Overviews have been spotted showing AI-written summary text instead of excerpts pulled directly from the original page, Search Engine Roundtable reported on October 23. SEO practitioner Brodie Clark first spotted the change and posted screenshots on X, and Search Engine Roundtable's Barry Schwartz confirmed the same pattern on some of his own test queries.

Clark said "this text is being summarised based on the information that Google thinks is most relevant to the query," adding he hadn't seen citation cards display AI summaries like this before. Schwartz confirmed a similar pattern in his own testing, but noted that "the text doesn't appear exactly like this on the page."

Schwartz quipped that the pattern amounts to "AI generating more AI, for more AI," suggesting that not just the AI Overview answer itself, but now the citation text backing it up, is being rewritten by AI as well.

The behavior doesn't appear on every query; Schwartz only observed it on some of the searches he tried. Google has not officially confirmed or explained the change, and it remains unclear whether this is a rolled-out feature or a limited test. Which regions or languages it appears in, and under what conditions it triggers, are also unknown for now.

Citation cards were previously understood to pull real sentences directly from the cited page. This observed shift, where even that summary text may now be AI-generated, is a different kind of change, and it means the description shown in a citation card may no longer match the source page's actual wording.

If this pattern spreads more broadly, it would mean that no matter how carefully a brand crafts its own page copy, the citation card in an AI Overview could instead show Google's own reinterpretation of it, potentially with a different nuance or missing key details.

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If you've been assuming that text shown in AI Overview citation cards matches your page's actual wording, it's worth factoring in that the text itself may now be Google's own summary. Search for queries where your site gets cited and compare the citation card text against your actual page content. Since this is still an early, unconfirmed pattern, there's no need to react immediately, just watch how it's being summarized and keep a record of examples.

Source: Search Engine Roundtable, October 23, 2026. Checked October 26, 2026. Read the original