AI Mode is Google’s conversational search surface, and it behaves differently enough from AI Overviews that treating them as the same thing will cost you. Not in the optimisation work, which largely transfers, but in what you can measure and in how long a page stays useful.
The short version: get the page extractable, cover the follow-up questions rather than just the opening one, and accept that you cannot report on this surface separately.
What AI Mode actually is
AI Overviews is the generated summary that appears above traditional results. You did not ask for it, and the links underneath are still there.
AI Mode is the thing you opt into. It answers in prose, cites a handful of sources, and then holds a conversation. You ask a follow-up, it answers that too, and the thread continues without ever returning a list of ten links.
That conversational part is the bit most optimisation advice skips, and it’s where pages win or lose.
It starts by rewriting your question
Before AI Mode retrieves anything, it decomposes the question into sub-queries and runs them in parallel. Google calls this query fan-out, and it’s covered properly in our piece on query fan-out.
The consequence for this surface specifically: you’re competing across questions you can’t see, and then across follow-up questions the user hasn’t asked yet.
A page built to answer one commercial query tends to survive the first exchange and vanish from the second. A page that covers the cluster, including the awkward parts, stays in the thread.
What to do on the page
Most of this is unglamorous and most sites get at least two of them wrong.
Write sections that stand alone. Retrieval works on passages. If a section needs the paragraph above it to make sense, it can’t be lifted out, and lifting out is the whole mechanism. Read each section cold and ask whether a stranger could use it on its own.
Put the answer first in every section. Direct answer in the opening sentence or two, reasoning after. Sections that build to a conclusion have buried the only sentence worth quoting.
Use headings that state the question. The heading travels with the passage when it’s extracted, which makes it the strongest signal of what that passage answers. “What it costs” beats “Pricing”.
Answer the follow-ups on the same page. This is the AI Mode specific one. After the opening question comes the comparison, the cost, the timeline, the risk, and the alternative. If those live on five separate pages, you’re relying on five separate retrievals going your way.
Cover what you’d rather not. Price, limitations, who shouldn’t buy, what a competitor does better. A large share of real follow-up questions are exactly these, and most commercial pages dodge all four, which disqualifies them from the half of the conversation where buying decisions get made.
Keep the technical foundations working. Crawlable, fast, correct schema, sensible internal links. The sub-queries run against Google’s index, so a page Google hasn’t fetched isn’t a candidate no matter how well it reads. We found our own site wasting a sixth of its crawl requests on redirects, errors and blocked URLs, with a substantial new article sitting uncrawled for three weeks in the middle of it.
What you can and can’t measure
This is where I’d push back on most of what’s being sold at the moment.
Google has said AI Mode clicks and impressions are included in the Search Console Performance report, aggregated into the existing Web search type rather than split out. The traffic is counted. You just can’t isolate it.
So any tool handing you a confident AI Mode number is inferring it, usually from prompt sampling against its own query set. That’s useful as a directional signal and it’s not a measurement. The distinction matters when somebody puts a percentage in a board pack.
What you can do honestly:
- Track whether you’re named for a fixed set of your own commercial questions, asked on a schedule.
- Watch the gap between impressions and clicks on your commercial pages, because answered-in-place looks like high impressions and almost no clicks.
- Report enquiries. On our own site over 90 days, 6,442 page-one queries produced zero clicks between them. Position said one thing. The enquiry count said another, and the enquiry count was the one worth acting on.
I’m a strong believer that if you can’t name the source of a number, it doesn’t belong in a report. That rules out most AI Mode dashboards and it’s still the right call.
On blocking it
You can opt out. Google-Extended is a separate crawler token, so blocking it removes you from some AI training and grounding while leaving ordinary Search indexing alone. It’s a genuine choice rather than a bluff.
For most commercial sites it’s the wrong trade. You’d be withdrawing from the surface your buyers are moving towards to protect content whose job is to be found. The businesses where this deserves a real conversation are the ones whose content is the product, where being summarised for free is the whole problem.
That’s a licensing question dressed as a robots.txt question, and it’s covered in our piece on AI crawler blocking and pay-per-crawl.
Where to start
Take your most commercially important page. Ask its primary question in AI Mode, then ask the three follow-ups a real buyer would ask next. Note which of the four your page could plausibly have answered.
Most pages manage one. Getting to three on a page you already own beats publishing anything new.