What do you need to know about Google’s AI mode?

We’d only just hung up our headphones from hearing Charlie Marchant explain how AI Overviews in Google are changing the SEO game, when Google dropped a new bombshell. At their annual I/O conference, they announced the launch of AI Mode.

So, we got Charlie Marchant (CEO of Exposure Ninja) back on the phone to see what’s coming, how it works, and what businesses need to do about it.

For people who haven’t watched the announcement, what’s going on?

After several months of testing in Google Labs, all Google users in the US can now try out AI Mode.

“AI mode is essentially just another LLM, another large language model that works in a similar way to Gemini or ChatGPT, but now it’s actually in Google’s browser.

So our (Exposure Ninja’s) head of SEO thinks that they’ve done that as a bit of a backlash towards losing traffic to ChatGPT where people are just searching in other LLMS and Google are saying, ‘Right, we’ve got the tech, let’s integrate it into our browser so that we’ve got it immediately’.”

I already use Gemini, is AI Mode basically the same thing?

“Gemini 2.5 Pro is the underlying model that’s being used [to power AI Mode]. But they do give different answers, which very disappointing for everyone.

They’re built on the same model, but they are intended to deliver different things. So, Gemini is a chat assistant, AI mode is a real-time search-based answer system.”

To see this difference in action, I asked the same question to Gemini and to AI Mode:

Good afternoon! I’ve just signed up for my first marathon. I’ve run half marathons before, but I’m out of shape after not running at all for over a year. What do I need to think about when it comes to training and preparation?

While there are clear similarities between Gemini’s answer and AI Mode’s, the differences are also obvious. AI Mode delivers results more in line with the Google Search experience we all know; it’s richer, with sources and links prominent. Gemini’s approach is more of a black box; links are there if you scroll further, but don’t appear in the first few paragraphs.

How does AI Mode compare to the AI Overviews in “traditional” Google Search?

In the interest of fairness, I put the full long-form query above into “traditional” Google Search:

Surprisingly, AI Overviews didn’t show up at all!

So, I tried a more typical Search: “marathon training”

You can see how AI Mode takes advantage of the extra context provided by the longer query.

When will we see AI Mode in the UK?

“I think it would be reasonable to guess it could be end of this year. I suspect they will want a more sophisticated version up and running in the US before they start that global roll-out and enough time to gather data from it as well.”

It’s worth getting your head around AI mode now, as its arrival in the UK is a certainty, but the timeline is not. As with anything, even if there are major changes between now and wider global roll-out, people who are already familiar with it will have a distinct advantage.

How about mainland Europe?

“In Europe there are so many regulations. I think they’ll have a really difficult time when it comes to the global roll-out. It took them ages to roll-out AI Overviews in Europe. Most of Europe didn’t get that until March this year. And UK and US have had that for over a year.”

What should businesses do?

If you’re a US business, AI Mode is there in Google, so you can start using it to see how it works. If you’re not in the US, get yourself a VPN (Virtual Private Network) set up and try out AI Mode for yourself.

“Go up the funnel for the kinds of keywords that you know that your customers search, and then actually see what’s coming up in AI Mode. Then think about your back catalogue of content and this query fan out technique. Is your content aligned with that? Or do you have loads of irrelevant content that’s just confusing AI mode on your website?”

Is my existing SEO strategy dead?

Not necessarily. We learned that AI Mode uses a technique that Google is calling “Query Fan-Out”.

Based on the I/O presentation, it looks like “classic” Google searches will still be carried out, but by an AI rather than by a human. AI Mode will simply do the large number of searches that you would previously have done anyway, and present an overview of the results.

“I think there’s probably two different perspectives on it depending on the type of SEO and content strategy someone’s been running. If someone has a really solid SEO strategy and they’ve been creating content in clusters or pillars with lots of related topics and all of those topics are actually relevant to what they sell and what they do as a business, this is definitely not as scary as if people have been using old SEO strategies where they’re just whacking out a piece of content for one question and they’re not thinking about related content and topics to that.

I also think the Query Fan-Out technique means that if your website has got loads of old content that you’ve not been pruning or keeping track of, about topics that are getting tangentially related now, I think that will probably be a disservice to the business under AI mode.”

How will I track the success of my content in AI Mode? Will I just see the loss of traffic as people get served results without clicking through?

“I mean, the jury’s out on this.

So at the moment, AI mode traffic is just showing up as a sort of normal traffic in the referrals, the same way it was coming through as organic or direct traffic in GA4.

The scepticism I have is they never put any kind of tracking in GA4 or Search Console for AI Overviews. So, I suspect they might be loathed to do it for AI Mode. Because what they don’t want is the whole SEO community, data analysts and everyone else trying to compare how current search with the 10 blue links compares to AI Mode. Because it’s likely that AI Mode is a is a going to be a sharp drop in traffic for those websites.”

How will AI Mode handle Paid Placement? Can big companies just pay to appear more prominently in AI-generated results?

“I think they will still label ads, they would lose a lot of credibility if they didn’t.

I definitely hope they wouldn’t manipulate the organic. That’s almost like a question of pay to pay to play, beyond ads. I definitely don’t think that’s their plan and I think they would lose a lot of credibility if they did.

They’ve already published a blog on their Ads & Commerce blog showing a sample of what it would look like for an ad on mobile. It’s an example that includes Wix, the website builder; it’s essentially still labelled as ‘Sponsored’.”

Final Thoughts

“The worst thing to do would be ignoring it and hoping, praying and burying our heads in the sand that this isn’t going to become a default search. It’s already moved from Labs to US roll-out. It will move to UK roll-out after that and eventually it will move to global roll-out. So, we may as well actually start now. It’s early doors. It’s a good opportunity to do it before other people have thought about it.

I think we will look back on search how it is now and how it has been for the past 10, 20 years. And we probably will think that was really a heavy burden on the searcher; it was manual and to us it doesn’t feel manual now.

Think back to card catalogues in libraries. When they were invented, they represented a much more efficient way to search an entire library for a particular book or topic. But if you were presented with one now, you’d be horrified at how much effort it requires from you. AI Mode is simply the latest step on this journey.”