Editorial
The Gist
- AI Mode Expansion: Google rolls out AI Mode as the successor to AI Overview, making it available to all search users.
- Analytics adoption: Google Search Console updates metrics to track AI Mode activity, including clicks, impressions and positions.
- AISO Concerns: Analysts worry about increasing zero-click searches as AI-powered results reduce website traffic.
Google’s AI Mode first rolled out in May as the company’s next major step beyond AI Overviews.
Now, months later, the dust has settled — and it’s the right moment to take stock of what this feature actually means for marketers, publishers and SEO teams.
Early reactions focused on the shock factor of AI-driven answers taking up prime SERP real estate. But the long-term implications are becoming clearer: AI Mode is reshaping how searchers engage with information, how websites earn visibility and how analytics teams must rethink performance measurement.
With expanded availability and new Search Console reporting behind it, AI Mode has moved from experimental to operational. Here’s what the industry has learned so far — and why its growing influence demands attention from anyone who relies on organic search for discovery, traffic or revenue.
SEO practitioners are closely watching Google's latest AI initiative: AI Mode for Search. Google AI Mode is a search interface that presents search query results in a narrative more comprehensive than AI Overview.
Now, Google is rolling out more support for its latest search engine feature. Google has added AI Mode for Search, making it available for users. It has also adjusted Google Search Console to account for AI Mode activity.
This rollout coincides with widespread AI adoption across industries and professions.
How AI Mode Is Performing So Far
Fresh reporting from Search Engine Land this week shows that AI Mode is already reshaping how Google measures and reports search activity. The feature may have had a slow start driving web traffic but is gaining steam.
Google confirmed that AI Mode impressions, clicks and positions are now included in Search Console — but cannot be broken out separately. Because AI Mode traffic is blended into standard web search reporting, marketers can see the impact, but not isolate it. As Search Engine Land notes, this creates a “blind spot” in understanding true AI-driven traffic, especially since referrer data from AI Mode often remains hidden.
Meanwhile, new three-month data from Semrush’s AI Visibility Index reveals how volatile AI search has become across Google AI Mode and ChatGPT. Semrush analyzed 2,500 prompts across five industries and found dramatic shifts in brand mentions, source preferences and model behavior — all of which determine which companies appear in AI-generated answers.
- Brand visibility in Google AI Mode is tightening. Brand mentions dropped 4% from August to October, suggesting Google is applying stricter controls to which brands appear.
- Source diversity is rising. Google AI Mode increased its source diversity by 13%, a slower and more conservative rise compared to ChatGPT’s 80% jump in October alone.
- Reddit has surged inside Google AI Mode. While ChatGPT cut Reddit usage by 82%, Google AI Mode increased Reddit citations by 75%, making it its No. 2 most-used source.
- Top brands remain stable — but newcomers face turbulence. Across both platforms, only 25 new brands broke into the top 100 over three months, and just two cracked the top 50, reflecting a more stable “upper tier.”
- Model similarity is low for sources. ChatGPT and Google AI Mode agree on brand mentions 67% of the time, but agree on sources only 30% of the time — proving that AI visibility strategies must be model-specific.
The takeaway: AI search platforms are experiencing rapid, continuous shifts. Brands that want to maintain visibility must monitor these changes in real time and adjust their content and source strategies on a per-model basis.
Related Article: Survive the AI Takeover of Search — 5 Moves Every Brand Must Make
What Is Google AI Mode?
Let's dial it back for a moment. Google launched AI Mode during its annual Google I/O developer event. It had been introduced in March in lab mode and became available to all users.
Google AI Mode is a dedicated tab within Google Search that provides AI-generated comprehensive responses rather than traditional search results lists.
Unlike AI Overviews that appear above regular search results, AI Mode creates an entirely AI-focused interface. Users interact primarily with AI-generated content rather than traditional link-based results. AI Mode is designed to accommodate further exploration, reasoning or comparisons of content to provide an accurate answer.
AI Mode represents a significant evolution in how consumers will discover and research products. Search engines have always presented metadata from websites that are crawled.
A person making a query would see a website page title and a description with a link. Over the years, Google added additional information, like the business profile, that would appear alongside the search results. With AI Mode, traditional search components like a link card or image carousel appear depending on whether it fits the explanation as a relevant element.
How Google Search Console Is Accommodating Google AI Mode
Originally called Webmaster Tools for its capability of logging the frequency of website page loads, Google Search Console has been the marketers’ go-to resource for assessing how well a website page is being crawled by search engines. To better match the changes from AI Mode, Google is adjusting how Search Console considers page performance initiated from AI Mode activity.
The analytic update focuses on three metrics: impressions, position and clicks. The metrics are influenced by AI mode-related activity. Google explains how these metrics are interpreted.
AI Mode Search Performance Metrics
How Google Search Console interprets activity originating from AI Mode.
| Metrics | Description |
|---|---|
| Clicks | Any click on an external link surfaced within an AI Mode response is recorded as a click in Search Console. |
| Impressions | A page that appears inside an AI Mode response is counted as an impression, even if users do not interact with it. |
| Position | Position reflects where a page appears within an AI Mode answer for a given query. The ranking calculation mirrors standard search results. |
All of these metrics appear in the Performance Report. The click and impression changes are intuitive, given the AI Mode’s appearance. The activity operates in the same manner as those for a search result, so analysts should be able to interpret metrics or adjust their downstream reports with little difficulty.
In support of the change, Google updated its documentation for Search Console. The help documentation now includes a new section to clarify how clicks, impressions, and positions are counted in AI Mode.
With respect to metrics, follow-up questions within AI Mode are treated as a new query. This means impression, position and click data associated with a response are associated with a given user query.
Is AI Blocking People from Visiting A Website?
Not everyone in the marketing industry is excited about AI Search. Some SEO strategists are concerned that features like AI Overviews have diminished traffic to the websites, and that AI Mode will continue that trend. SEMRush noted in its research on AI search that a higher rate of zero-click activity – clicks that generated no site visits – is occurring with AI Overview.
The New Reality: Zero-Click Search Dominates
- According to The Digital Bloom’s 2025 Organic Traffic Crisis Analysis Report, zero-click behavior is now the default state of Google Search. The report finds that 60% of all Google searches — and 77% of mobile searches — end without a single website visit. More than half of searchers never click anything, regardless of how well a page ranks.
- AI Overviews are further accelerating the decline in organic clicks. When an AI Overview appears — now for 13% of queries and rising — click-through rate drops by 47%. Even more alarming: publishers report that only 1% of AI Overview users click the cited sources.
- This is not a small-publisher problem — major media brands are experiencing steep drops. The Digital Bloom report cites declines including: CNN (-27% to -38%), Forbes (-50%), Business Insider (-40% to -48%), Washington Post (-19% to -40%), and Daily Mail U.S. (-32% to -44%). These shifts indicate systemic change rather than isolated performance issues.
- Even SEO leaders aren’t immune. HubSpot — long considered a benchmark for world-class SEO — lost 70–80% of its organic traffic. Their CEO publicly acknowledged that “organic search traffic is declining globally,” reinforcing that this downturn reflects a structural shift rather than execution failure.
- Across the broader industry, the median trendline is just as stark. Among 19 premium publishers including The New York Times, Vox, and Condé Nast, median Google Search referral traffic fell 10% year-over-year. Non-news publishers performed even worse, dropping 14%. For many organizations, this has become the new baseline for organic visibility.
Rising Zero-Click Behavior Raises New Concerns
Zero-click searches occur when users receive an answer to their query without clicking a link on the search engine results page (SERP). Zero clicks are of high interest because they ultimately disrupt the concept behind online search – to receive a website that is an answer for someone’s need for further information or to purchase an offering. Search engine users find their desired information directly on the search results page, eliminating the need to click through to a specific website.
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Moreover, the volume of users conducting an AI-based search like AI Overview is growing. SEMRush noted that 13.14% of all queries triggered AI Overviews in March, up from 6.49% recorded in January.
All of this has SEO strategists alarmed. What can marketers do to draw people to a website if they are gaining the information they want from AI? While organic click-through rates are diminishing, according to industry reports, the majority of searches remain organic. After all, AI only sends around 1% of the referrals to websites.
Google Gains in AI While Protecting Its Search Turf
As I mentioned in my post on AI Search Optimization (AISO), inserting AI into search results has been the expected next-level evolution of search and SEO strategies. Given Google’s substantial market share of the search engines (still around 90%), an incorporation of AI into search was a logical step.
Gemini Becomes Google’s Strategic Center of Gravity
Plus AI Mode is an opportunity to further market Gemini. Google AI Mode when first launched was powered by a specialized version of the then latest AI model, Gemini 2.5. Gemini 2.5 models were designed to offer significant advancements in reasoning and multimodal capabilities, making accurate understanding of long context.
Google has invested resources in bringing its initial AI ventures under the Gemini banner. As Google makes Gemini available as an assistant to its mainstream services, such as Workspace and Google Analytics, Google needs to provide its AI so that users who are brand loyal to its halo product remain so, maintaining its popularity in search.
Why Marketers Need AISO Readiness Now
The immediate action items are straightforward: Start monitoring your Google Search Console performance reports for AI Mode activity. Analyze which of your pages are appearing in AI responses and optimize content to provide the comprehensive, authoritative answers that AI systems prefer to cite. Most importantly, shift from thinking about SEO to AISO — AI Search Optimization — where the goal isn't just ranking high, but becoming the source AI systems trust and reference.
The marketers who understand this shift early will have a significant competitive advantage. Those who don't risk becoming invisible in a search landscape where users increasingly get their answers without ever clicking through to a website. The question isn't whether AI search will reshape digital marketing—it's whether you'll be ready when it does.
The bottom line: Google's AI Mode isn't just changing search results; it is the pivotal point of how marketers must consider online discovery and what it means for brand content discoverability. The time to adapt your content strategy is now, not when zero-click searches become the majority.
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