GEO glossary

Google AI Mode

Google AI Mode is a conversational search mode in Google Search that answers complex, multi-part questions with an AI-generated response and links. It runs many related searches behind each question, supports follow-up questions and appears as its own tab on the results page.

Reviewed by Gareth Hoyle, Managing Director
Last reviewed 31 October 2026

When did AI Mode launch?

Google announced AI Mode as a Search Labs experiment on 5 March 2025 and began rolling it out to everyone in the US on 20 May 2025. It started rolling out in the UK on 28 July 2025, running on a custom version of Gemini 2.5. In the UK it appears as a tab on the results page and in the Google app on Android and iOS.

How is AI Mode different from AI Overviews?

AI Overviews sit above the normal results for queries where Google decides a summary helps. AI Mode replaces the results page with a conversation. Google says early UK users asked questions two or three times the length of traditional search queries, and that the mode is built for tasks such as comparing products, planning a trip and understanding complex how-tos.

Both rely on query fan-out. Google describes AI Mode as breaking a question into subtopics and issuing a multitude of queries at once on the user's behalf. Its Deep Search option can issue hundreds of searches to produce a fully cited report.

How to optimise for AI Mode

Google's guidance is the same as for AI Overviews: no special markup or files are needed, and AI Mode traffic is included in the Web search type in Search Console. Because AI Mode answers long questions by searching many sub-questions, coverage matters more than a single target keyword.

A page that answers the follow-up questions a buyer would ask, such as cost, timescale, alternatives and risks, gives the system more passages to retrieve.

Example

A prompt such as 'which electric family car has the most boot space for under £40,000 and can charge at home overnight' might fan out into searches about boot capacity, list prices, battery size and home charger speeds. A dealer page with a clear specification table and current pricing could be retrieved for several of those sub-queries.