What changed
On October 30, 2026, Trisolute News Dashboard news SEO strategist Joy Johnston published a comparison of monitored US Google search result pages from October 2025 through August 2026. In the tracked set, the share with only a News Box fell from 75% to 34%; the share with only an AI Overview rose from 5% to 33%. Where both features appeared, the AI Overview was above the News Box in 96% of desktop observations and 87% of mobile observations. The study also describes Google putting Top Stories carousels within AI Overviews, reducing immediately visible story slots relative to some conventional News Boxes.
Why it matters
News publishers and independent information sites that relied on Top Stories placement can no longer assume a News Box is the dominant top-of-page format. Editorial teams should monitor SERP feature mix and device differences for their actual news topics, track whether their reporting is linked inside AI Overview carousels, and connect those observations to their own Search Console click data. This is a distribution and measurement problem, not proof that Google caused a specific publisher's traffic decline or that every query follows the same pattern.
The measured shift is in SERP features, not publisher visits
Johnston analysed monthly US Google SERP reports from Trisolute News Dashboard over October 2025–August 2026. News Box-only SERPs declined 41 percentage points, while AI Overview-only SERPs increased 28 points. The article does not disclose the total number of tracked queries, how the query panel changed, or a raw downloadable dataset. The percentages should not be presented as the prevalence of these features across all US Google searches.
Desktop is more strongly displaced than mobile
When both an AI Overview and a News Box appeared, the AI Overview ranked above the News Box 96% of the time on desktop and 87% on mobile in the monitored sample. That is a conditional position metric, not the percentage of all queries that contain an AI Overview. The study reports some recovery in desktop AI Overview visibility after a May dip and less recovery on mobile.
Top Stories within AI Overviews changes the number of visible slots
The analyst observed that Google increasingly presents Top Stories inside an AI Overview carousel instead of a separate conventional News Box. On desktop, the example AI carousel exposes three stories before horizontal interaction, whereas a traditional News Box can expose several publishers at once. The interface could change and no controlled click-through comparison was supplied.
How to use the finding without overclaiming
Monitor the same topic/query panel over time, separate desktop from mobile, record News Box-only, AI Overview-only and combined cases, and measure your site's inclusion and click-through separately. Google's core updates and other distribution shifts coincide with the trend but cannot be isolated as causes by this analysis. Trisolute supplies the original observations; its published national news SERP reports show a wider measurement practice, not independent replication of the exact US comparison.
Broader publisher context is consistent but not a direct validation
The Reuters Institute's 2026 Digital News Report documents the wider move of news consumption toward social and video platforms and growing use of AI chatbots. That audience research uses different methods and does not independently verify Trisolute's Google feature percentages. The practical implication is to diversify direct audience relationships while evaluating the search-format change on a publisher's own data.