What are blue links?

The term only exists because something newer came along and needed a name to be compared against. For most of Google's history a results page was, structurally, just a ranked list of clickable links. Once AI Overviews and similar answer boxes started appearing above that list, people needed a short way to refer to the older format specifically, and blue links is what stuck, after the color those links were traditionally rendered in.

The reason the term shows up constantly in AI-visibility discussions is that it marks what's shrinking. As more queries get answered directly above the blue links, fewer searches end in a click to any site at all, which is the substance behind the term zero-click. Tracking how often a query resolves in an AI answer versus how often it still routes a person down to the blue links is one of the more concrete ways to see how much a given category of query has shifted.