At Google’s annual I/O conference in 2024, the introduction of a new tool called AI Overviews was announced for public rollout, quickly followed in the spring of 2025 by Google’s new AI Mode. With the introduction of these AI-powered search formats to the general public, a profound shift soon followed in both the way that the world’s most popular search engine works and the way that people use it. Gone are the days of endless scrolling through search results, replaced instead with a sleek textbox or interactive chatbot, powered by Google’s Gemini AI model and capable of answering any question, no matter how complex, longwinded, or niche. For businesses wanting to learn how to rank in these Google AI overviews, how to have their sites appear in AI Mode answers, and how to optimise content for AI search as it becomes increasingly popular, it’s important to first understand how AI overview on Google really works and to what degree user behaviour has actually changed.
What is Google AI mode and Google AI Overview?
What is AI Overview on Google, what is Google’s AI Mode, and how exactly do they differ? Just a summary of the top ten search results, a fancy new chatbot, or something more powerful? Although they’re both supported by Google’s Gemini model, AI Overviews was launched first and is a new feature of the classic search engine results page rather than its own, separate search engine like AI Mode. When asked a question, Overviews scrapes relevant information from the top-rated results and uses Gemini’s language functions to craft a cohesive answer, often linking to sources and pages cited in its answers. This answer appears at the very top of the search results page and is designed to save time, effort, and unnecessary scrolling for searchers looking for quick, concise answers without trawling through potentially irrelevant websites.
According to an article published by Google during its 2024 rollout, Overviews introduces a faster, easier, and more streamlined way to search for information on the internet, using a customised Gemini model to combine the AI’s advanced capabilities with state-of-the-art search systems. Specifically, AI Overviews is capable of multi-step reasoning, planning, and answering multimodal queries (more complex questions which require an understanding of multiple information sources in order to form a complete response), meaning that it’s able to significantly reduce the time you spend searching by doing the ‘legwork’ for you.
In comparison, AI Mode, rolled out in the UK in July of 2025, is its own separate tab that must be selected from the Google toolbar, taking the user to a chatbot-style tool similar to ChatGPT or Gemini that prompts you to “ask detailed questions for better responses.” This AI Mode uses Gemini to search the web for your queries and answer them in a conversational back-and-forth, meaning that the user is essentially ‘chatting’ with Google’s AI and has no need to ever visit websites or exit the chat if the answers provided by AI Mode are satisfactory. Google’s AI Mode is the natural progression from small, snippet-like Overviews to a fully AI-native search experience, designed to replace traditional Google Search and its pages of links with a conversational, organic approach to information acquisition online. As Google puts it, AI Mode is an end-to-end AI search experience, allowing you to ‘chat’ with an AI model that will search the internet for you and then give you personalised answers.
So, what actually happens when you submit a search that uses Google’s AI, whether as an Overview or in AI Mode? Behind the scenes, the AI is using Google’s query fan-out technique to break your question down into multiple subtopics and make searches on your behalf, allowing Google Search to provide you with deeper, more relevant answers. As Digiday explains it, imagine you search Google for “best trainers for walking.” The AI will then break that question down into multiple relevant subtopics, such as “best trainers for men”, “best trainers for walking in different seasons”, “best trainers for walking on a trail”, and so on, pulling information from all of these individual searches to generate a comprehensive answer. This mechanism allows Google’s AI to answer longer and more complex queries, extrapolating upon the user’s search and anticipating their next steps, likely with the goal of keeping people within the search experience.
How are Google’s AI-powered search tools different from traditional Google Search?
The most significant difference between AI-powered search functions and traditional Google Search is that users are being directed away from and thus interacting less and less with individual web pages, as Overviews and AI Mode both provide comprehensive answers without the need for visiting multiple pages and scrolling through potentially irrelevant content. Despite Overviews only featuring on the search engine’s results page for little more than a year, Google has already reported significant changes in user behaviour as a result, with one of the most important being that people are overall happier with answers provided by AI Overviews, driving more than a 10% increase in usage of Google for the types of questions that show these Overviews.
It’s not all doom and gloom for businesses worried about search visibility, however. Google is committed to providing links within both its Overviews and AI Mode answers to the source websites, even claiming that these links actually receive more clicks than if the page had appeared as a traditional listing. And for those wanting to learn how to rank in these Google AI Overviews and how to optimise their content for AI Mode, there are plenty of ways to ensure your sites get just as many clicks and scrolls as ever.
How to rank in Google AI overviews and Google AI Mode
Learning how to optimise for Google’s Overviews and AI mode is a crucial step in ensuring that your sites don’t get lost in the noise of search results and AI summaries. Whilst SEO is still an important part of search engine ranking and indexing, a new specialism dubbed ‘GEO’ (Generative Engine Optimisation) or ‘AEO’ (Answer Engine Optimisation) has emerged to address the digital marketing industry’s growing need to further tailor content to the preferences of AI search models. This practice, in simple terms, involves ensuring that the crawlers which furnish AI models with their information can easily understand enough about your content that it is then synthesised into and linked by an AI response. This can be achieved by:
1. Focussing on the ‘citability’ of your content, not just how high it may rank
Traditional SEO tactics have often seen the research and knowledge elements of website copy fall to the wayside in favour of using as many high-ranking keywords as possible to boost search result positions, resulting in content that may perform better but not contain much (or any) valuable information for the reader. Whilst keywords remain a key part of digital strategy, AI search engines present a renewed opportunity for businesses to make informative, well-researched content a priority. If Google’s AI model considers your website an authoritative source on a topic and thus citable within its summarised answers, it’s much more likely that your content will be linked and promoted to users.
2. Creating deep, well-structured, authoritative content
Similar to the previous point, content that is comprehensive, well-structured, and assumes an authoritative position on its topic will be favoured by AI crawlers ‘fanning out’ and looking for high-quality sources to provide answers. Learning how to rank in Google AI Overviews and AI Mode involves producing content that delves beyond the superficial and provides real value to those who read it - AI will reward quality content produced slightly less frequently over mediocre copy churned out as quickly as possible.
3. Using tools like schema markup, FAQs, and semantic linking
Diversifying the structure and composition of your content not only helps people to parse it for information more easily but AI crawlers as well, making it a crucial tactic when learning how to optimise for AI search. Some examples include:
- Schema markup: Also known as structured data, schema markup is code that can be added to the HTML code of your web page in order to explicitly define the context and meaning of your content to search engines, rather than letting it rely on the plain text alone (remember, search engines can’t ‘read’ or ‘see’ pages like we can, and rely on data in the form of code). If you delineate in explicit terms exactly what your page ‘looks’ like, how it’s structured, and what each section means, search engines can understand, rank, and promote your site much quicker and with greater accuracy.
- FAQs: Abbreviated from Frequently Asked Questions, FAQs are a great way to structure content as they mimic the conversational, question-and-answer format used by AI models such as Google’s AI Mode. They allow for focussed keyword targeting, improved dwell time on your page or site from visitors, and increased opportunities for inclusion in Google’s Featured Snippets, which are high-visibility Q&A style answer boxes that, alongside AI, dominate modern search results.
- Semantic linking: This is a subsection of semantic SEO, which is the practice of creating informative, relevant content by focussing on the meanings and topics behind search queries as opposed to just keyword volume. Semantic linking involves making sure there exists within your content robust, high-quality hyperlinks both inbound (directing to another page on your site) and outbound (directing to a different site entirely), creating an easily-accessible network of content which provides depth, context, and legitimacy to search engines and users alike. If your internal links are well-placed and relevant, this acts as a ‘vote of confidence’ to search engines which signals that your network is high in quality; similarly, by using outbound links to your advantage, your page is providing another ‘vote of confidence’ to the linked site which can then be returned in a practice called backlinking - check out this in-depth blog for more information on this.
4. Ensuring brand consistency, originality, and creativity - AI won’t reward you for duplicate, generic, or generated content (ironically!)
One of the most important - and, luckily, one of the most intuitive - tools in learning how to rank in Google AI Overviews and AI Mode is ensuring that your content is original, creative, and brand consistent. If your content is duplicate, generic, or low-quality, engaging in a practice known within the industry as “scaled content abuse” (mass-creating unoriginal content in order to manipulate search rankings rather than provide value to users), then Google will demote your content so that it’s less visible to searchers. Another facet of this abuse is, somewhat ironically, pages with primarily AI-generated, low-quality content, which Google has recently directed its quality raters to assign the lowest ranking (reserved for pages created with little to no effort, little to no originality, and little to no added value for website visitors). To ensure you’re consistently ranking in AI-powered results, make sure your copy is always original, creative, tonally consistent, and provides real value to readers.
How digital experts can help you transition smoothly
Unsure of where to begin with optimising your content effectively for AI search engines? Digital marketing agencies like Rawww are experts in leveraging web presence and helping businesses transition smoothly from traditional SEO strategies to innovative, AI-friendly approaches, often with their fingers to the pulse of trends, techniques, and tools that busy owners and managers might otherwise miss.
The creatives and digital experts at Rawww will help you transition by undertaking a comprehensive site audit to assess your own unique position and its readiness for AI-powered search engines, crafting a bespoke SEO and GEO joint strategy tailored to generative searching. We’ll draft content roadmaps and earmark milestones that align with your business’ specific goals and objectives, helping you cut through the noise and perform well by pairing creative design with strategic optimisation.
Whether you love it or hate it, the AI-volution can no longer be ignored. Now that you’re a certified expert in Google AI Overview, AI Mode, how they differ, and the advent of generative searching, you have all the tools needed to explore how to rank in Google AI Overviews and how to optimise for AI Mode.
In need of some expert advice? Contact Rawww today for an AI-ready SEO audit of your brand.
