How to Show Up in Google AI Mode Now That Google Is Sending Searchers There
If you want to show up in Google AI Mode, you have to track and work on it as its own channel, separate from AI Overviews, since the two pick different sources for the same question (only 13.7% of their citations overlap, according to Ahrefs). Google is also moving more of its searchers into AI Mode, so the distance between "we show up in AI Overviews" and "we show up where people are asking" keeps growing.
I don't think most brand teams have caught up to this yet. A lot of the AI visibility reporting I see treats AI Overviews as the stand-in for "Google AI," and that made sense a year ago when AI Mode was a tab most people never clicked. It makes less sense now.
The short version
Google says AI Mode passed a billion monthly users in May, and since late August it has been opening some AI Overviews straight into the full AI Mode experience.
AI Mode and AI Overviews agree on the answer most of the time and cite mostly different pages to get there, so ranking in one tells you little about the other.
Google is the top cited source inside AI Mode, mostly its own results pages and Business Profiles, so your rankings and your Business Profile still feed it.
The brand signals that line up best with AI Mode visibility are mentions of you on other sites and on YouTube, well ahead of Domain Rating.
What Google changed in the last few weeks
On August 28, Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable reported that some AI Overviews had dropped the "Show more" button and were loading the full AI Mode experience by default, with the "Ask anything" box underneath and the organic results pushed further down the page (Search Engine Roundtable). Google's statement said AI Overviews "may dynamically expand for topics where our systems determine it's most useful for people." Robby Stein, who runs product for Google Search, added that the expansion stops if you've already started scrolling.
Then on September 28, Google opened AI Mode's information monitoring to all users, after keeping it for Pro and Ultra subscribers (Search Engine Journal). You tell AI Mode what to watch for, a price drop or a product coming back in stock or a new restaurant nearby, and Search keeps checking websites, forums and its Shopping Graph, which Google says covers more than 60 billion products. A day later TIME ran a long piece on how Google has been moving regular searchers into chatting with AI one feature at a time, through the homepage button, the "Ask anything" bar and now the expanded Overviews (TIME). Stein told TIME that Google sees AI Mode as a way for older users to experience AI for the first time.
Put that next to what Google said at I/O in May. AI Mode had "surpassed one billion monthly users, with queries more than doubling every quarter since launch" (Google), and I wrote at the time that the click-driven web was on a shorter clock than I'd been telling people (Google I/O 2026 and the End of the Click-Driven Web). Pew found that 60% of U.S. adults say they read the AI summaries at the top of search results (Pew Research Center). My guess is a big share of AI Mode's growth from here comes through that on-ramp, people who read an Overview, get dropped into the chat, and keep going. That's a guess, since Google doesn't break the numbers out that way.
AI Mode and AI Overviews read different pages
Back in June I wrote that for Google's own engine, "it's still SEO" mostly holds up (Google Just Called Most GEO Tactics Useless). I still think that's true for AI Overviews, where a big chunk of the citations come from pages that already rank. AI Mode is where it gets shakier.
Ahrefs compared 730,000 pairs of answers from AI Overviews and AI Mode for the same queries, pulled in September 2025 (Ahrefs). Only 13.7% of the citations overlapped. The two agreed on what to say about nine times out of ten, with just 16% of their wording in common. AI Mode answers ran about four times longer and named 3.3 entities on average, where AI Overviews named 1.3. If a brand showed up in an AI Overview, it had about a 61% chance of showing up in AI Mode for the same query, usually with more competitors sitting next to it.
So a few things follow for a brand marketer. AI Mode has room for more brands in each answer, which is good news if you're the third or fourth player in your category and rarely make the short list in the Overview. It builds those answers from a different stack of pages than the Overview does, so the page that wins you the Overview may not be the page AI Mode reads. If your reporting uses AI Overviews as the proxy for all of Google's AI, you're leaving out the surface Google is steering people toward.
Same query, two Google answers
AI Overviews and AI Mode share 13.7% of their citations
Ahrefs compared 730,000 pairs of answers to the same queries. Pick a measure to see how the two differ.
Source: Ahrefs, "AI Mode vs AI Overviews" (730,000 response pairs, September 2025 data, published December 2025). Answer length shown relative to AI Overviews.
Google cites Google more than anyone
SE Ranking tracked 68,313 keywords across 20 industries in February and collected about 1.32 million AI Mode citations (SE Ranking). Google.com made up 17.42% of them, more than YouTube, Facebook, Reddit, Amazon, Indeed and Zillow combined, up from 5.7% in June 2025. Of those Google links, 59% pointed to Google search results pages and 36.1% pointed to Google Business Profiles. Google was the top cited source in 19 of the 20 industries, and in travel it was more than half of all citations (53.18%).
Publishers have plenty of reason to be unhappy about that number. It also means a citation that sends somebody to a Google results page sends them to a page where your organic listing, your Business Profile and your reviews may be sitting. That means the unglamorous work, ranking for the questions people ask and keeping your Business Profile complete and current, still feeds AI Mode, just one step removed.
Who AI Mode cites
Google is the top source in 19 of 20 industries
SE Ranking collected about 1.32 million AI Mode citations across 68,313 keywords. Google.com made up 17.42% of them.
Source: SE Ranking, "Is Google stealing your clicks in AI Mode?" (1,321,398 citations, February 2026, published March 2026). Industry bars show Google.com's share of all AI Mode citations in that niche.
What lines up with AI Mode visibility
Ahrefs looked at 75,000 brands and measured which signals track with how often a brand shows up in ChatGPT, AI Mode and AI Overviews (Ahrefs). For AI Mode, YouTube mentions came in at 0.740 and branded web mentions at 0.709. Branded anchor text was 0.628 and branded search volume 0.466. Domain Rating was down at 0.285. Those are correlations, and Ahrefs is careful to say so, so I wouldn't read them as a recipe. Still, it's hard to look at that list and conclude the answer is more pages on your own site.
That's the same pattern I saw in the AI Verdict Study for the other engines. When buyers asked the opening "what are my options" question, brand websites were only 4% of what the engines cited, and the shortlist got built mostly from other people's pages (Where AI Engines Go to Decide About Your Brand). I should say up front that study covered ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity, not AI Mode, so treat this as me connecting two data sets.
How to show up in Google AI Mode
I would work on it in roughly this order.
Number one, get the Google basics right, because AI Mode leans on them. Check where you rank for the questions buyers ask in your category (the long, conversational versions, not only the two-word head terms), and go through your Google Business Profile like a customer would. Hours, categories, photos, services, reviews and responses to reviews all live on a page AI Mode cites constantly.
Two, work on being mentioned elsewhere. Review sites, comparison articles, industry roundups, Reddit threads and YouTube videos are where the Ahrefs correlations point, and they're where the AI Verdict Study engines went to build shortlists. If you have a product that's easy to demo, a handful of honest YouTube reviews from people who aren't you is probably worth more for AI Mode than another blog post on your own domain.
Three, write for the follow-up question. AI Mode is a conversation, and Kevin Indig's user study from October 2025 (37 people, 250 tasks) found that 77.6% of AI Mode sessions ended with zero visits to outside sites (Search Engine Journal). Comparison tasks produced almost no clicks at all, and shopping tasks produced the most. So the pages worth having are the ones that answer what a buyer asks third or fourth, like pricing, limitations, how you compare to a named competitor, and who you're a bad fit for. The answer gets read inside AI Mode whether anyone clicks or not.
Then last, measure AI Mode on its own. Google Search Console's main performance report includes AI Mode queries, and follow-ups show up as their own queries, which is why some sites are seeing strange ones like "yes, pricing" (Search Engine Roundtable). John Mueller put it this way: "If a user asks a follow-up question within AI Mode, they are essentially performing a new query." The separate generative AI reports don't include query data, so the main report is where to look. I'd also run a fixed set of buyer prompts through AI Mode and AI Overviews separately, every month, and keep the two in different columns. I wrote more about what's measurable and what isn't in Is AEO Measurable?, and the bigger picture of where brands stand is in The Click That Didn't Happen.
Two-minute self-check
Are you set up to show up in Google AI Mode?
Answer seven questions. You'll get a score and the fixes to start with.
If you'd like a quick read on where you stand before you build any of that, the free Quick Check is where I'd start.
Where I'd like help
I don't have a good answer yet for how much of AI Mode's traffic is people who meant to search and got moved into a chat, versus people who went looking for it. If you've been tracking AI Mode separately from AI Overviews for your own brand, I'd love to hear what you're seeing, especially if it doesn't match what I've laid out here. The idea that engines judge brands by what other people say about them runs through my book, Explainable, and AI Mode looks like one more place where that holds.
Jarred Smith is the author of Explainable: Why AI Recommends Some Brands & Ignores Others, an Amazon bestseller on AEO, GEO, and SEO. He's a marketing leader with nearly 20 years of experience across healthcare, public media, retail, and environmental services. Find him at jarredsmith.com.