Google AI Mode
AI Mode is Google's conversational search experience that answers complex questions with an AI-generated response and links to its sources.
What is Google AI Mode?
AI Mode is a search mode in Google Search that answers questions with a conversational, AI-generated response instead of a list of results. It is based on Google’s Gemini models, launched in the US in 2025 and has since been rolled out to many countries and languages, including German and Spanish. Users open it in a separate tab in Google Search and can ask follow-up questions.
AI Overviews are summaries shown above the regular results. AI Mode instead replaces the results page with an AI answer and is built for longer, more complex questions. To answer them it uses query fan-out: one question is broken into many sub-searches whose results are combined.
What AI Mode means for businesses:
- Fewer clicks for simple informational queries, as the answer is given directly.
- Visibility depends on being used as a source (AI citations) and on being named in answers (brand mentions).
- Ads can appear in AI Mode too; campaigns using broad match, AI Max or Performance Max are eligible.
The fundamentals of SEO still apply: pages have to be indexed and eligible to appear in Google Search, and there is no separate submission or markup for AI Mode. Our entry on Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) covers how to optimize for AI answers across platforms.