AI Mode

DefinitionAI Mode is a conversational search experience in Google Search that answers a question with an AI-written response and links, and lets you ask follow-ups.

Google introduced AI Mode in 2025. Like AI Overviews, it may use query fan-out to search several subtopics at once, and pages need to be indexed and snippet-eligible to appear as links. The same Search controls apply: Googlebot rules in robots.txt, and nosnippet or noindex.

AI Rank Lab can run a prompt on Google AI Mode (those runs use US English results) and check batches of queries with a country and language per query.

Learn it step by step

• How AI engines pick the sources they cite (AEO and GEO fundamentals)

Related terms

• AI Overview: An AI Overview is the AI-generated summary Google shows at the top of some search results, with links to the pages it drew on.
• Query fan-out: Query fan-out is when an AI search system turns one question into several narrower searches, retrieves results for each and combines them into one answer.
• LLM (large language model): A large language model is an AI model trained on very large amounts of text to predict and generate language. GPT, Claude and Gemini are LLM families.