Definition
AI Mode is Google's conversational search mode: a separate tab next to the regular results where you ask a question in plain language and get an extended, Gemini-written answer with sources, after which you can follow up as if you were talking to an assistant. Google launched AI Mode in May 2025 in the United States and rolled it out over the following months to most countries and languages, including Dutch.
The difference from AI Overviews is one of scale. An AI Overview is a summary above the classic list; AI Mode replaces that list with a single answer. To do so, Google splits the question into dozens of sub-questions (query fan-out), searches the index for each sub-question separately and merges the results. A follow-up builds on the conversation, and the mode is multimodal: you can start from a photo or a spoken question. For online stores, agentic features come on top, such as price alerts and checkout based on Merchant Center data.
For traffic this means fewer clicks per query, but a different distribution of the clicks that remain. Sources appear as links inside the answer and in a panel next to it, and they are chosen per sub-question. A page that does not rank for the main question but gives the best answer to one specific sub-question still gets cited. Long-tail pages that were invisible in the classic results get a chance here.
Optimising for AI Mode is optimising for the sub-questions. That means pages that answer the concrete questions inside such a fan-out per subject — specifications, prices, differences, conditions — in readable HTML with structured data. There is no separate crawler and no separate opt-out: AI Mode uses the same Googlebot and the same index as the regular search results. Online stores also need their product feed in Merchant Center in order, because AI Mode pulls prices and stock from it.
Measurement runs on two tracks. Search Console counts clicks and impressions from AI Mode in the regular web report without showing them separately. If you want to know which sources appear for which questions, you have to fetch the answers yourself periodically for a fixed set of questions. Traze does that alongside its measurement in ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, so you see per question where you are and are not mentioned.