What is Google AI Mode?

It helps to separate AI Mode from the summaries Google puts above the results right from the start, because they are two different things. AI Mode is a separate tab, with its own conversation: you ask a question, Google answers with written text and a set of links, and you can keep asking about what it told you. For a store it matters because it is where the shopper asks the questions they used to spread across several searches, and where the comparison between products can be settled before the first click.

How it works

On October 8, 2025, Google expanded AI Mode to 36 new languages and about 50 more countries and territories. It appears as a button on the Google results page and in the Google app for Android and iOS, and it answers using Google's Gemini models.⁠^{[1]Google, Google Spain blog (October 8, 2025; in Spanish). La Búsqueda de Google: el Modo IA llega a España} It accepts multi-part questions and follow-ups, and Google says early users ask questions two or three times longer than traditional search queries.⁠^{[1]Google, Google Spain blog (October 8, 2025; in Spanish). La Búsqueda de Google: el Modo IA llega a España}

Inside, AI Mode breaks the question apart. Google explains it this way: it breaks your question down into subtopics and fires off a barrage of simultaneous queries to dig deeper into the web.⁠^{[1]Google, Google Spain blog (October 8, 2025; in Spanish). La Búsqueda de Google: el Modo IA llega a España} That technique is query fan-out, and it is why AI Mode can show a wider and more varied set of links than a classic search.⁠^{[2]Google Search Central. AI features and your website} The pages it uses come from Google's index, retrieved with its usual ranking systems.⁠^{[3]Google Search Central. Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search} When Google is not very confident in an answer, it shows a set of web results instead.⁠^{[1]Google, Google Spain blog (October 8, 2025; in Spanish). La Búsqueda de Google: el Modo IA llega a España}

According to the documentation for site owners, AI Mode is especially useful for searches that call for exploring, reasoning or comparing options, and it gives a complete answer with links to the sites that back it up.⁠^{[2]Google Search Central. AI features and your website} It also takes voice and image questions: you can snap a photo or upload an image and ask about it.⁠^{[1]Google, Google Spain blog (October 8, 2025; in Spanish). La Búsqueda de Google: el Modo IA llega a España}

Shopping in AI Mode

In May 2025, Google announced a shopping experience inside AI Mode that combines Gemini with its Shopping Graph, with more than 50 billion product listings, of which more than 2 billion are refreshed every hour. With it, AI Mode shows a panel of images and products that changes as you refine the search, and the announcement included an agentic checkout: you track a product's price and, when it drops and you confirm the purchase, Google adds it to the cart on the merchant's site and completes the payment with Google Pay. Google announced both features for the United States.⁠^{[4]Google, The Keyword (May 20, 2025). Shop with AI Mode, use AI to buy and try clothes on yourself virtually} To show up there, the route Google points to is Google Merchant Center: its feeds help make your products visible in AI answers and in the rest of Search.⁠^{[3]Google Search Central. Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search}

What a page needs to show up

There are no additional technical requirements to appear in AI Mode, according to Google: the page has to be indexed and eligible to be shown in Search with a snippet.⁠^{[2]Google Search Central. AI features and your website} Its optimization guide adds a condition: the site has to be included in the generative AI features of Search from Search Console.⁠^{[3]Google Search Central. Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search}

The rest is the same old SEO, and Google lists it: allowing crawling in robots.txt and at the CDN, linking pages well to each other, having the important content in text, making sure structured data matches the visible text of the page and keeping the Merchant Center and Business Profile information up to date. No AI file or special markup is needed.⁠^{[2]Google Search Central. AI features and your website} To limit what AI Mode shows from your pages you use the snippet controls (nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet) or noindex; Google-Extended is not the tool, because it refers to training and grounding in other Google systems.⁠^{[2]Google Search Central. AI features and your website}

In a store

A fictitious example of a session. Someone asks AI Mode: "I'm looking for a camera backpack that fits as carry-on and holds up in the rain." The screen it returns mixes three things worth separating when you analyze it:

Saying "we show up in AI Mode" without saying which of the three rows is only half the story. A link in the answer and a product in the panel are two different appearances, with different origins.

How to check it

1. Open AI Mode on google.com and ask it the question your customer would ask, without your brand. Note the answer, the links and the products separately, with date and time.
2. Inspect in Search Console a page that should show up: that it is indexed and that nothing stops it from showing a snippet.⁠^{[2]Google Search Central. AI features and your website}
3. Check that the site is included in the generative AI features of Search, in the Search Console settings.⁠^{[3]Google Search Central. Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search}
4. Open the generative AI performance report. It shows impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode, by page, country, device and date. It has been available for all sites since August 31, 2026, it only appears if your site adds up enough impressions and it does not include Search Labs experiments.⁠^{[5]Search Console Help. Generative AI performance report (Search)} Those visits also count in the overall performance report, under the "Web" search type.⁠^{[2]Google Search Central. AI features and your website}
5. Repeat the question another day. One session is a sample of one: if the link or the product shows up again, it is a pattern worth looking at.

Related concept: AI Overviews

AI Overviews is the summary that appears above the regular results, without switching tabs, and only when Google thinks it adds something; it often does not appear.⁠^{[2]Google Search Central. AI features and your website} AI Mode is a separate experience you choose to enter, built for questions that call for exploring or comparing, and with conversation.⁠^{[2]Google Search Central. AI features and your website} Both can use query fan-out and both count in the same Search Console report,⁠^{[5]Search Console Help. Generative AI performance report (Search)} but they do not necessarily show the same links.

For the general framework, there is the entry on AI search; for what Google says about optimizing for these features, the one on GEO (Generative Engine Optimization), and the rest of the vocabulary is in the AI search reading path.