How AI Mode works
Google says AI Mode uses a query fan-out technique: it breaks your question into subtopics and runs many searches at once on your behalf, then writes one answer from what it finds. It is built for questions that need exploring, comparing or reasoning, the kind that used to take several searches.
Google introduced AI Mode as a Search Labs experiment on March 5, 2025, and started rolling it out to everyone in the US, with no Labs sign-up, on May 20, 2025 (blog.google).
AI Mode and AI Overviews are different things
An AI Overview is a summary at the top of a normal results page, and Google shows one only when its systems decide it adds something. AI Mode is a separate mode you open, and it works like a conversation. Google's documentation says the two may use different models and techniques, so the answers and links they show will differ.
What AI Mode changes for SEO
Google's guidance for site owners is that there are no extra requirements: a page has to be indexed and eligible to show with a snippet in normal Search, and no special schema or AI text file is needed. Visits from AI Mode are counted in Search Console's Performance report, inside your total Search traffic.
What does change is how many ways in a page has. Because one question becomes many searches, a page can be cited for answering one sub-question well, even if it would never rank for the full question. Pages that answer the specific follow-up questions your buyers ask get more chances.