In Google AI Mode, people ask Google their question in full sentences, by voice, or with a photo, and can dig deeper with follow-up questions without explaining the context again. According to Google, AI Mode is particularly helpful for questions that need further exploration, reasoning, or complex comparisons. These can include comparisons between products or providers. AI Mode can be reached from its own button on the Google homepage, a tab in Google Search, and the Google app.
Google started testing AI Mode in Search Labs, its program for experiments, in March 2025 and began rolling it out to everyone in the US in May 2025. In October 2025, the rollout in German, as KI-Modus, started in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.
How AI Mode builds an answer
Behind the scenes, AI Mode breaks a question down into subtopics, runs separate subqueries for each subtopic at the same time, and combines the results into one answer. Google calls this technique query fan-out.
For its answer, AI Mode draws on pages from Google’s web index and, according to Google, on its own data sources such as product data and the Knowledge Graph (Google’s knowledge base). The links in the answer lead to pages that support its statements; such source references are AI citations. When the system is not confident enough, AI Mode shows links to websites instead of an AI answer, according to Google. Google also notes that AI Mode doesn’t always get it right.
AI Mode, AI Overviews, and Gemini
AI Overviews are short AI-generated summaries that Google shows directly in Google Search for some questions. AI Mode, by contrast, is a separate area for longer conversations with follow-up questions and comparisons. The two are connected: according to Google, people can ask a follow-up question from an AI Overview that continues in AI Mode and carries over the context of the original question.
Gemini is Google’s AI assistant with its own app. AI Mode runs on a customized version of Gemini models, but it is part of Google Search. Whether a website’s content can appear in AI Mode is therefore governed by Google Search’s settings. The rule for Google-Extended in robots.txt, by contrast, controls whether content may be used to train Gemini models and for answers in Gemini Apps; according to Google, it does not affect whether a site is included in Google Search.
What AI Mode means for websites
On the technical side, Google says the same requirements and controls apply to AI Mode as to AI Overviews: a page must be in Google’s web index and eligible to be shown with a text snippet, and since August 2026, a setting in Google Search Console has let website owners take an entire site out of both features. How often links to the site appeared in the two features combined is shown there in the generative AI performance report.
On the content side, query fan-out plays a particular role: a page can be linked for a single aspect, such as costs, requirements, or a comparison, even if the original question was much broader. It can therefore pay off to answer your customers’ follow-up questions on the relevant pages in clear, self-contained sections—that is, with high citability; whether a page is actually linked is Google’s decision.
For products and local businesses, Google names additional data sources: product data from Google Merchant Center, where businesses submit their products to Google, and Google Business Profiles, a type of business listing, can help products and services appear in AI answers. Since 2025, Google has also been adding agentic features to AI Mode, starting in the US: like an AI agent, AI Mode handles parts of tasks such as reservations or purchases, which are only completed with the user’s approval. In January 2026, Google introduced the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) for purchases directly in AI Mode, an open standard that Google developed together with companies such as Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target, and Walmart.
AI Mode generates each answer fresh, follow-up questions build on the conversation so far, and people who have turned on personalization can get answers tailored to them. Because of this answer variability, a single query shows only part of the picture. How your business appears in AI Mode is one part of your AI visibility. A reliable picture only emerges when typical customer questions are asked repeatedly in AI Mode itself through prompt tracking, not just in AI Overviews or Gemini. The mention rate shows how often a company is mentioned in the process.