What is Google AI Mode? A Complete Guide for SEOs and Content Creators

The online search landscape is rapidly changing, and artificial intelligence (AI) is the driving force behind this transformation. Google AI Mode represents a significant leap, redefining how we interact with information.

This article unravels AI Mode, how it functions, the best ways to optimize your content, and how we can help you on this journey.

Table of Contents

• How Does Google AI Mode Work? A New Era for Search
  • What Are the Main Characteristics of AI Mode?
  • How Google understands what you want: Topic Search and “Query Fan-Out”
• How Can I Optimize My Content for Google AI Mode?
  • The New SEO: A Comparison with Traditional SEO
  • What Loses Priority or Changes Drastically with AI Mode?
• Essential Strategies for the New SEO
• Get ready for AI Mode!!
• Niara helps you Adapt to AI Search

How does Google AI Mode work? A New Era for Search

AI Mode isn’t just an improvement; it’s a new way to interact with Google. It builds on AI Overviews but expands on them, leveraging the power of the Gemini 2.5 model to deliver a smarter, more conversational, and more personalized search experience.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Google (@google)

Google has been making significant strides in implementing AI across its products, and on Wednesday, July 1st, it added the AI Mode button to the homepage of its search interface. This was accompanied by an AI-themed Google Doodle and a prompt encouraging users to “Try AI Mode and search like never before.”

See the news coverage about this new feature and how it’s being received by the market:

What Are the Main Characteristics of AI Mode?

AI Mode stands out due to its innovations that make it more intuitive and powerful:

Multimodal Search: Beyond Text Queries

Imagine you find an interesting plant on the street but don’t know its name or how to care for it. With AI Mode, you can simply take a photo and ask: “What plant is this and how do I grow it in my apartment?” Google will not only identify the plant but also provide a detailed care guide, all from an image. It understands your questions through text, voice, and images. For SEO, this means our images and videos gain a new layer of importance—they aren’t just illustrations, but data points for search.

Advanced Reasoning with Gemini: The Core of AI Mode

AI Mode is built on the Gemini 2.5 model. Think of Gemini as an expert in understanding context. If you ask, “What’s the best bike for commuting and light trail riding?”, it won’t just look for “bike.” It uses its reasoning to consider “daily transport,” “exercise,” and “varied terrain,” providing a personalized answer that grasps the nuances of your need. For us SEOs, this means understanding intent becomes even deeper: we need to think beyond the keyword to the “why” behind the search.

Conversational Search: Your Query Becomes a Dialogue

Search transforms into a conversation. You can start with a broad question like, “I want to plan a family vacation.” Then, you can refine it: “Which destinations are good for small children in the Northeast?”, and then, “What can we do in those places with 3-5 year olds?” AI Mode follows the flow of your conversation, remembering context and answering follow-up questions naturally and helpfully. For SEO, this challenges us to create content that not only answers an initial question but also anticipates the next three or four.

Real-time Information: Always Current

AI Mode stays up-to-date by integrating fresh data from Google’s Knowledge Graph, real-world information, and shopping details from billions of products. This ensures answers are always relevant and current, whether it’s the score of a recent game or the latest product promotions. For our optimization work, the speed of updates and the accuracy of real-time data gain even more importance.

Access and Experimentation: An Evolving Landscape

AI Mode is actively evolving. It’s currently in a testing phase within Google Labs, available to Google One AI Premium subscribers in regions like the US and India, and is continually being improved based on user feedback. This is a reminder for us SEOs that the testing phase is the ideal time to observe and adapt.

How Google understands what you want: Topic Search and “Query Fan-Out”

To deeply understand how AI Mode processes information, it’s essential to look at “Topic Search” a concept Google has patented, which is intimately linked to what we call Query Fan-Out.

Imagine Google doesn’t just give you a list of websites, but first organizes your search query into “broad topics.”

According to US Patent US12158907B1, filed by Google LLC, the topic search system functions in three main steps (patent information analyzed with Niara’s help):

1. Obtaining Relevant Results: First, in response to a search query, Google obtains relevant results, which include a set of “responsive documents” (i.e., web pages). It collects and generates the answer from various content.
2. Extracting Main Topics: Next, Google reads the content of these sites and identifies the most important topics within them. For example, for the search “moving to Rio de Janeiro,” Google might notice that the most relevant sites talk about “neighborhoods,” “cost of living,” “things to do,” and “pros and cons.” Each of these is a “topic.” It’s as if Google took a complex book and created an intelligent index with the most relevant chapters.
3. Organizing and Displaying Topics: Finally, Google organizes search results based on these topics and presents them in an easy-to-understand way. This organization can appear in various formats, such as lists, user interface (UI) cards, or horizontal and vertical carousels. The cool thing is that these topics are “clickable.” If you click on “neighborhoods” for “moving to Rio de Janeiro,” Google understands that you want to delve deeper into that subject. It might even perform a new internal search, such as “moving to Rio de Janeiro and neighborhoods,” to give you even more specific results.

AI Mode uses this “query fan-out” technique by simultaneously issuing multiple related searches through subtopics and various data sources. It combines all these results to provide an easy-to-understand answer, offering a breadth and depth of information greater than a traditional search. For us SEOs, this means that our content doesn’t just need to answer one question, but be so comprehensive that the AI can extract multiple “topics” and valuable snippets from it to answer many different user questions. Your content becomes an “information hub” for the AI.

How can I Optimize my content for Google AI Mode?

With the rise of AI Mode, traditional SEO evolves. The focus shifts from simple keyword matching to creating more comprehensive, reliable content that aligns with how AI processes and synthesizes information.

The New SEO: A Comparison with Traditional SEO

For an SEO professional receiving this news, the first question is: “What changes in practice?” Here’s a comparison:

What Loses Priority or Changes Drastically with AI Mode?

It’s important to note that few things in SEO become “totally unnecessary.” What happens is a shift in priority and approach:

• Obsession with exact keywords and density: The old practice of “keyword stuffing” or excessive concern with keyword density loses much of its meaning. Gemini understands the topic, context, and intent, not just term repetition. The focus shifts to comprehensive semantic coverage of a topic (we detail this process in the article about Google’s new algorithm, MUVERA).
• Thin Content or content generated solely for search engines: Pages with little value, created only to rank for a specific term, will have even less chance of being considered a reliable source for AI Mode. AI prefers robust, useful, and in-depth content.
• Exclusive focus on traditional position-based ranking: While ranking well is still important, the main goal becomes “being the source of the AI’s answer.” This may mean appearing in an AI Overview, even if your link isn’t in the “traditional” first position. The click might come from curiosity to delve deeper into your source.
• Ignoring non-textual formats: Previously, good SEO could focus almost exclusively on text. Now, with multimodal search, ignoring the optimization of images, videos, and even audio is a strategic mistake.

Essential Strategies for the New SEO:

1. Create Comprehensive and Contextualized Content (Think like a book, not just a paragraph):Your content needs to be a complete source. If previously Google only looked for the exact phrase, now AI Mode, powered by Gemini, wants to understand the whole chapter. This means that instead of just answering “what is X?”, you should address “what is X,” “how X works,” “who benefits from X,” “advantages and disadvantages of X,” and “examples of X.” The more in-depth and interconnected your content is on a topic, the greater the chances that AI Mode will consider it a primary and reliable source for synthesizing answers.
2. Optimize for Natural Questions and Answers (Be a good conversationalist):With the conversational nature of AI Mode, your texts must be “answerable.” Think about the questions your audience would ask in a conversation and answer them directly in headings (H1, H2, H3) and paragraphs. Structure your content with sections of “Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)” that anticipate user queries. Clarity and conciseness in answers are fundamental for Gemini to process and use your information.
3. Prioritize Quality and Authority (E-E-A-T): Trust is Everything:In the AI Mode universe, being a reliable source is more vital than ever. Google wants to ensure that AI-generated answers come from sources with proven Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T). This means your site needs to be recognized as a reference. Content signed by experts, citations of relevant sources, and a history of accurate information are crucial. Remember: even with all the artificial intelligence, AI can make mistakes, as in complex mathematical equations. Therefore, the authenticity and human review of your content remain your greatest differentiator and point of trust for Google and the user.
4. Consider Multimodal Search (Prepare your store for visual customers):Multimodal optimization is like preparing your store for different types of customers. If before you only focused on text, now your images and videos also need to “speak” to the AI. Optimize your images with alt text descriptive and clear captions. Think about how an AI would process visual content to answer a question. In the future, this may extend to the optimization of videos and other media formats.
5. Understand “Query Fan Out” (Anticipate the user’s next questions):Imagine that someone searches for “picnic ideas.” The AI Mode will not only answer about picnics, but will anticipate other doubts such as “what to bring,” “best places,” “easy recipes” – this is “Query Fan Out.” It breaks down a single query into multiple intents to provide a more complete answer. Our article on Query Fan Out explains this dynamic. By understanding this, you can create content that already answers the full range of possible questions related to your topic, covering the entire “search funnel” in a single page or content cluster.
6. Monitor AI Overviews and User Behavior (Learn from the present for the future):AI Overviews are already live and can be seen as a “dress rehearsal” for AI Mode. Observe how Google is already synthesizing information for your keywords. Tools for analyzing AI Overviews, such as the Conversational Query Report, are essential to understand how your site is being represented and what impact it has on traffic. This monitoring will give you valuable insights into how AI Mode might interact with your content in the future.

Get ready for AI Mode!

While AI Mode is actively being rolled out and tested in the US, continuous preparation is an investment in the future:

• Continuous Education: Stay informed. Follow news from Niara, Google, and other SEO experts. The search landscape is constantly changing, and staying updated is your biggest asset.
• Test and Adapt: As AI Mode is already active in regions like the US, take advantage of this to observe how it works. Use these observations to test and adapt your strategies, applying what you’ve learned on a smaller scale.
• Focus on User Experience: Ultimately, both AI Mode and traditional SEO aim to provide the best user experience. High-quality, relevant, easy-to-consume content that truly helps your audience solve problems or find information, always will be valued by Google, regardless of the technology.

Niara helps you adapt to AI Search

At Niara, we are committed to guiding SEOs and content professionals through the complexities of the new search landscape. Our features and tools are designed to provide data based on real-world information that will help you to adapt and thrive with AI Mode.

• New Google AI Mode Insights Tool (Free): To help you navigate this new era, we’ve launched our free Google AI Mode Insights tool. This tool was developed to provide analysis and recommendations on how you can optimize your content for this new reality, configured according to Google’s own documents on how AI Overviews and AI Mode work in Search.
• Conversational Query Reports: Our Conversational Reports provide “hidden” data in your Google Search Console about how people are performing conversational-style searches on Google Search. By analyzing 25,000 queries (25x more than available in GSC), Niara helps you to map the complex search intents users are already expressing in the search engine, identifying exactly where your content can fill gaps and stand out.
• Chat with GSC Data: The Conversational Analytics is an innovative approach that allows users to interact with data through ChatSEO and gain insights quickly and easily.
• Insights on AI Overviews on YouTube: With multimodal search and the growing importance of video, understanding how AI influences YouTube results is vital. Our article on AI Overviews on YouTube offers valuable insights on how your video creations can be discovered and utilized by this new search intelligence.
• Image SEO (Free): Optimize your images to stand out in search results. The Alternative Text Generator creates automatically the image HTML with relevant descriptions.
• Structured Data Generator (Free): Help search engines better understand your content and display it more richly and prominently in search results (rich snippets). The Structured Data Generator analyzes the page, captures the information and generates the structured data for you, in seconds.
• Convert YouTube Videos into Optimized Articles in Seconds (Free): Ensure your ideas reach new formats and audiences, boosting organic traffic for your blog. Access YouTube to Article now!

Google AI Mode represents a significant leap in the evolution of search. By understanding its capabilities and applying adapted optimization strategies, SEOs and content professionals can not only prepare for the future, but also lead the innovation in their areas.

Explore our exclusive resources and begin building your strategy for the future of search.

With Niara, you’ll be ahead!