What Is Google AI Mode? How to Turn It On, Use It, and What It Means for Your Brand

AI Mode is Google's way of searching with artificial intelligence inside Google Search. You ask a question, get an AI-generated answer and can keep going with follow-up questions, along with links to web pages related to the topic.

According to the Google Help Center, AI Mode is similar to AI Overviews but offers more ways to interact and uses advanced reasoning. It is built for questions that used to take several searches, such as getting to grips with a new concept or comparing options.

How it works

The feature relies on a technique called query fan-out. It splits your question into subtopics, searches each one at the same time across multiple sources and pulls the results together into an answer that is easy to understand.

When Google introduced AI Mode as an experiment in Search Labs, it explained on The Keyword, its official blog, that the tool ran on a custom version of Gemini 2.0. Beyond web content, it drew on real-time sources such as the Knowledge Graph, real-world information and shopping data for billions of products. The first people invited to try it were Google One AI Premium subscribers.

When the system is not confident enough in the quality or usefulness of an AI answer, it may show a set of web links instead. Google also acknowledges that, like any early-stage AI product, AI Mode does not always get it right: it can misread what a page says or miss the context.

How to turn it on and use it

On the web, just go to google.com, type a question in the search bar and tap AI Mode. In the Google app, the option sits on the home screen. Follow-up questions go in the Ask anything bar at the bottom of the screen.

You can ask by text, voice, images or files, including PDFs and files stored on your device or in Drive. You can also paste a page's URL and ask a question about it. To pick up earlier searches where you left off, Google recommends turning on history and personalized recommendations. Anyone who wants early access to experimental features can turn on the experiment in Search Labs.

For better answers, the advice is to try different versions of the same question, ask for different perspectives or more detail, and double-check important information in more than one place by clicking through to the source links.

What it means for brand and AEO teams

Google Search Central documentation says the same SEO best practices that apply to Search in general also apply to AI Mode. To show up as a supporting link in AI Mode and in AI Overviews, a page must be indexed, be eligible to appear in Search with a snippet and meet Google Search's technical requirements. There are no additional technical requirements.

The recommended practices include allowing crawling in robots.txt and in your CDN or hosting setup, making content easy to find through internal links, keeping important content in text form, making sure structured data matches the visible text, and keeping your information in Merchant Center and your Google Business Profile up to date.

Traffic from these features is counted in your overall Google Search traffic in Search Console, in the Performance report, under the Web search type. To limit what is shown from your pages, you can use the nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet and noindex controls. For a brand that wants to be cited in AI Mode, the starting point is the basics: an indexable page, content in text and up-to-date information.