Google Messages now comes pre-installed on most Android phones, but it can’t perform to its full potential if you ignore its best features. Many of those features require you to enable them manually from the settings, so you need to follow a few extra steps if you want a top-quality messaging experience.
In addition to those changes, Google keeps introducing new features that benefit the user with no extra effort. The Mountain View tech giant has introduced one such feature in its latest Google Messages beta version 20251121_00_RC01. It doesn’t add anything flashy but improves a key feature in Google Messages: link preview.
Google is developing a Messages feature aimed at saving your time
You can save time without even noticing
Google Messages has a new way to display links
Link previews are a clever way to avoid falling for malicious websites, because you can quickly decide whether to click on a link based on the preview of the website’s content in your chats. Currently, it shows a preview with a link to the website and page description, and while these are useful pieces of information in certain scenarios, they make the preview look a bit cluttered.
Google Messages’ new feature wants to solve this problem by removing both the URL and page description from previews. Instead, as spotted by 9to5Google, the link previews show only the thumbnail, the domain name along with its icon, and the title of the content. The space previously occupied by the URL and page description has been used to make the cover image a bit taller.
While a slightly taller cover image looks great on YouTube thumbnails, it doesn’t make things any better for articles. In fact, removing the page description from article links might feel like a trade-off to some users. The only major advantage here is cleaner link previews.
This arrival of the link preview makeover isn’t surprising, though. Google started working on it months ago, and first learned about the revamp back in September this year.
There is no way to restore this behavior to the previous one, so if you want the link to appear, the only way to do it is by disabling the “Automatic preview” capability in Settings. To do it, open Google Messages, tap the profile icon, select Messages settings, click Automatic previews, and disable the Show all previews toggle. While it’ll restore the previous behaviour, you lose the ability to know what the link is about before tapping.
Google is currently testing this feature with beta testers, so if you’re not using the Google Messages beta, you won’t notice any change to the link previews for now.
