Navigating Google AI Mode:
6 changes you should expect.

Traffic from AI Mode will be lower than traditional search, but the visitors who do click through will be more qualified and closer to conversion.

The reality is stark: people will start to get most of their answers directly from AI without clicking through to websites. Google’s AI provides comprehensive responses that often satisfy user queries immediately, reducing the need to visit individual pages.

AI Mode represents an even more dramatic shift than AI Overviews. Research shows that approximately 93% of AI Mode sessions end without any visit to a website. At the same time, roughly three in four users never leave the AI Mode pane.

AI Mode sends referral traffic at just ~2%, compared to 17-19% for traditional Google Search. With over 100 million monthly active users already accessing AI Mode across the US, India, and UK, this represents a fundamental restructuring of how search traffic flows.

But here’s the critical insight – when users do click through from AI Mode, their visits are dramatically higher quality. Users spend an average of 15 minutes on site (compared to 8 minutes from traditional Google), generate 12 page views per visit (versus 9 from Google), and convert at significantly higher rates.

For transactional queries specifically, 69% of AI Mode sessions result in a click to a website, with users creating a “consideration set” of 3-7 businesses rather than clicking just one result. Think of it as quality over quantity: you’ll see dramatically fewer visitors, but they’ll be far more engaged and more likely to convert.

For business leaders, this means adjusting expectations around traffic volume whilst focusing on conversion quality and user experience once visitors reach your site.

And remember – no clicks doesn’t mean no value. 19% of people first learned about a company through organic search. Every impression is an opportunity to promote your brand. If you aren’t appearing in AI mode results, your competitors will be, and they will be gaining brand awareness.

AI Mode will prioritise established, authoritative brands over emerging players, creating visibility barriers for newer businesses.

Google AI Mode is deeply personalised, favouring known, trusted brands in results. If a user hasn’t previously interacted with your brand or category, Google may not surface your content in their AI responses.

This isn’t just about user history – it’s about brand authority at scale. Research shows that established brands with massive domain authority dominate AI responses. Sites with over 350,000 referring domains average 8.4 citations, whilst those with fewer than 2,500 referring domains average just 1.6–1.8 citations. AI systems favour the brands they ‘know’ – the biggest industry names with extensive web presence, authoritative backlinks, and widespread brand mentions.

Additionally, Google’s AI Overviews demonstrate a 43% self-referential citation rate, meaning they frequently cite Google’s own properties like YouTube. This preference of LLMs for known entities reinforces the importance of being an established, recognised brand.

This creates a Catch-22 for emerging brands: you need visibility to build recognition, but you need recognition to gain visibility. It’s more important than ever to have a strong, consistent brand presence across multiple platforms.

“Recognition is everything” – brands not already in a user’s ecosystem may be excluded from AI responses. This emphasises the critical importance of brand-building activities beyond traditional SEO, including PR, social media presence, and thought leadership content.

The metrics you’ve relied on for years – rankings, impressions, keyword positions – are becoming obsolete in the AI search era.

The metrics that have been relied on for years are becoming obsolete. Rankings and keyword tracking no longer tell the full story, especially since AI results are personalised and pulled from various sources. Tools like Semrush cannot report keyword positions for the majority of the UK as they won’t be able to see these personalised results.

While Search Console is beginning to provide AI-specific visibility data, this is still limited to impressions.

These challenges intensified in September 2025, when Google made significant changes to Search Console reporting. By disabling the &num=100 parameter, Google caused widespread impression drops – some sites saw 30–50% declines overnight, with 87.7% of tracked sites experiencing drops.

However, crucially, these were reporting changes rather than actual traffic losses. Many sites with stable or growing clicks saw their impressions plummet simply because Google stopped counting low-value, bot-generated impressions from deep search results. This highlighted a fundamental problem: the metrics we’ve relied on for years are becoming increasingly unreliable.

The new metrics you’ll need to track will be brand mentions (remember, impressions and brand name mentions build awareness, even if they don’t lead to conversions), citations in AI responses, on-site engagement metrics, branded search growth, and cross-platform visibility.

To track AI search visibility effectively, you’ll need new tools designed specifically for this landscape. Platforms like LLM Pulse allow you to monitor how your brand appears across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, and AI Mode. These tools track brand mentions, citation frequency, competitive share of voice, and sentiment – metrics that actually matter in AI-driven search.

Similarly, tools like ProFound and Scrunch provide real-time visibility tracking across multiple AI platforms, helping you understand not just whether you’re appearing, but how you’re being positioned relative to competitors.

This information will prove invaluable as AI becomes the norm for organic search.

SEO is evolving from a single-channel tactic into a comprehensive, cross-functional initiative requiring more resources and broader expertise.

Google’s AI doesn’t just look at your website. It draws insights from YouTube videos, customer reviews, Reddit discussions, social media posts, PR coverage, and even email receipts in Gmail. This comprehensive approach transforms SEO from a siloed channel into an integrated, full-funnel initiative.

SEO is now deeply tied to content marketing, PR, video production, social media strategy, email marketing, and overall brand strategy. We’re moving from Search Engine Optimisation to Search Experience Optimisation, and with so much more ground to cover, teams will need additional support.

In-house teams will need to expand their SEO scope by collaborating closely with content teams, video producers, social strategists, and digital PR experts. This change should drive teams to consider restructuring and becoming cross-functional, rather than working in silos.

For those working with agencies, budgets may well need to increase, as they will now have to cover multiple channels, not just Google.

AI Mode is evolving rapidly, requiring flexible strategies and frequent adjustments rather than set-and-forget approaches. Google is continuously testing and refining how AI responses are generated, what sources are prioritised, and how personalisation affects results. What works today may not work next month.

The old adage “the only constant is change” is truer now than ever in SEO. Strategies, approaches, and tactics will need frequent adjustment to adapt to AI developments. Both business leaders and SEO teams must acknowledge that this technology is new for everyone – there will inevitably be an element of trial and error with strategies.

This requires building flexibility into your marketing plans and maintaining close communication with your SEO team about performance changes and strategic pivots.

Your expertise and voice are becoming critical ranking factors – AI systems recognise and prioritise authoritative, human voices.

Personal authority and subject-matter expertise are becoming critical in AI-driven search. Google increasingly favours trusted, authentic voices when generating responses, actively listening to your experts – but only if they’re publishing content online.

This means founders, executives, and domain experts should contribute actively to LinkedIn posts, company blogs, video content, and industry interviews. Sharing unique insights, industry perspectives, and lived experience builds the kind of authority that AI systems pick up on and reference.

Leaders should consider taking a more active role in content creation, even if it’s just supplying ideas and key insights for your marketing team to develop. Your expertise and perspective could be the differentiating factor that gets your brand mentioned in AI responses.

Google AI Mode represents the most significant shift in search since the introduction of mobile-first indexing. For business leaders, this isn’t just a technical challenge for your SEO team to handle – it’s a fundamental change that requires strategic adaptation across your entire digital marketing approach.

The businesses that will thrive in this new landscape are those that embrace integrated marketing strategies, invest in brand-building activities, and adapt their measurement frameworks to reflect the new reality of AI-driven search.

Start preparing now: audit your current SEO approach, evaluate your team’s capabilities across multiple channels, and consider how you and other subject-matter experts in your organisation can contribute to building digital authority. The future of search is here, and early adopters will have a significant competitive advantage.

Francesca Hume

Francesca makes brands easier to find and harder to ignore. She keeps search and paid channels tuned to client goals, turning visibility into pipeline and pipeline into revenue.