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Google AI Mode: what it is and what it does to website traffic

Google’s conversational search reached Germany and Romania in October 2025 and now has over a billion monthly users. What it changes for the clicks a business website gets, what to measure in Search Console and what to do.

By Level UI12 min read · 28 sources

Google AI Mode is the conversational search mode Google opened to everyone in the US in May 2025, and to Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Romania and most of Europe in October 2025. Instead of a page of links it answers with a written response, with links inside and beside it, and it keeps going when you ask a follow-up question. Google says it has passed one billion monthly users. For a business website the questions are practical: how many of the clicks you used to get from Google does it keep, on which kinds of searches, and what can you measure and change? This is what is known as of 3 November 2026, from Google’s own announcements and documentation and from the independent studies that have measured clicks.

Google AI Mode, date by date

DateWhat happenedWhere
5 Mar 2025AI Mode starts as a Search Labs experiment on a custom version of Gemini 2.0US, Google One AI Premium subscribers
20 May 2025Open to everyone, no Labs sign-up neededUS
21 Aug 2025More than 180 new countries and territories, in English onlyWorldwide, English
7–8 Oct 2025More than 35 new languages and over 40 new countries, on Gemini 2.5Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Romania and others; over 200 countries in total
18 Nov 2025Gemini 3 Pro in AI Mode on the day the model launchedUS, AI Pro and Ultra subscribers
9 Dec 2025The European Commission opens an antitrust investigation into Google’s use of publishers’ content in AI Overviews and AI ModeEEA
20 May 2026Gemini 3.5 Flash becomes the default model; AI Overviews and AI Mode become one flow; over 1 billion monthly usersWorldwide
3 Jun 2026Search Console opt-out control and AI impressions report announcedUK first; all websites worldwide from 31 Aug 2026
22 Jul 2026AI Mode and AI Overviews launch in FranceFrance
15 Oct 2026Inline links shown higher and more often; test of a section for official sitesNo countries named
28 Oct 2026Ads in AI Mode scaled to ten more markets; ads in follow-up questions launch in the USAustralia, Canada, India and seven others; no EU country

From Google’s own announcements, read on 3 November 2026; the 15 October 2026 changes as reported by 9to5Google. The October 2025 expansion was announced on 7 October in Google’s global post and on 8 October in its German and Romanian posts, which said it would reach all users over the following week. The German post counts 36 new languages, the global one "more than 35".

What Google AI Mode is

AI Mode is a separate way of searching on Google. You open it from a tab on the results page, from the Google homepage or in the Google app, ask a question in full sentences, by voice or with a photo, and get a written answer with links to the pages it drew on. You can then ask a follow-up, and the next answer builds on the last one. Behind it is what Google calls query fan-out: the question is split into subtopics, many related searches run at once, and one response is written from what they return.

It is not the same thing as AI Overviews, the AI summary that appears above the ordinary results for some searches. An AI Overview sits on a normal results page, and Google shows one only when it judges that it adds something. In AI Mode the answer is the page. The two also cite different sources: in US data from September 2025, Ahrefs found that AI Mode and AI Overviews cited the same URLs only 13.7% of the time, even though their answers meant much the same thing. Since May 2026 Google has joined them into one flow, so a searcher can go from an AI Overview straight into a follow-up question in AI Mode.

When AI Mode reached Germany, Romania and the rest of Europe

For its first months AI Mode was a US product. Google opened it to everyone there on 20 May 2025, added more than 180 countries in English only on 21 August 2025, and on 7 and 8 October 2025 launched it in more than 35 new languages and over 40 new countries, bringing the total past 200. That second wave is the one that matters in Europe: Google’s German post announced the "KI-Modus" for Germany, Austria and Switzerland, and its Romanian post announced "Modul AI" in Romania, in Romanian, running on Gemini 2.5.

France was the exception. It was left out in October 2025 and got AI Mode and AI Overviews only on 22 July 2026. And not everything has crossed the Atlantic: in August 2026 hotel booking inside AI Mode was rolling out in the US in English, flight price tracking covered more than 180 countries but not the EEA, and when Google scaled ads in AI Mode to ten more markets on 28 October 2026, no EU country was among them. For a website in Germany or Romania the answers are here; the booking agents and the ads, so far, mostly are not.

How many people use it

Google’s own figure is large. At its I/O conference in May 2026 it said AI Mode had passed one billion monthly users and that AI Mode queries had more than doubled every quarter since launch, and it made Gemini 3.5 Flash the default model worldwide. Google did not say how many searches that is, or what share of all Google searches it makes up.

The independent figures are older and much smaller. Semrush’s clickstream data from US desktop searches put AI Mode at about 0.25% of Google search sessions in early May 2025 and just over 1% by early July. A billion monthly users does not mean a billion searches that no longer send clicks. What matters for your site is which of the searches that used to bring you visitors have moved, and that is something you can check.

What the studies say about clicks

Every serious measurement points the same way, with different sizes. Pew Research Center tracked the browsing of 900 US adults in March 2025: on Google searches that showed an AI summary, people clicked an ordinary result in 8% of visits, against 15% when there was no summary, and clicked a link inside the summary in 1%. Ahrefs, comparing December 2023 with December 2025 across 300,000 keywords, found an AI Overview correlated with a 58% lower click-through rate for the top-ranking page. Google’s answer is that clicks from results pages with AI Overviews are higher quality, because people spend more time on the sites they visit.

AI Mode goes further. In Semrush’s 2025 data, only 6–8% of AI Mode sessions led to a visit to another website. The cleanest evidence is a preregistered field experiment published on arXiv on 18 August 2026, in which 1,100 US Chrome users were randomly given ordinary Google, Google without AI, or AI Mode only for a week in March 2026. AI Mode only cut clicks to external websites by 18.8 percentage points against ordinary Google, and removing the AI features raised them by 8.8 points. On the searches AI Mode answers, most of the clicks a website used to get are gone.

Which searches lose clicks, and which hold

AI answers are not spread evenly across searches. In Pew’s data, searches of one or two words produced an AI summary 8% of the time, searches of ten words or more 53% of the time, and questions starting with who, what, when or why 60%. Semrush measured AI Mode queries at 7.22 words on average, against 4.0 for ordinary search. The long, informational question, how something works, what it costs, which option is better, is exactly where AI Mode is used and exactly where the click disappears.

The clicks that hold are the ones an answer cannot complete: buying, booking, calling, visiting, or looking for a company by name. Google’s own guidance points the same way. It names Merchant Center feeds and Google Business Profiles as the data that helps products and local businesses appear in AI responses, and on 15 October 2026 it began testing a section at the top of AI answers for the "one or two official places on the web" to complete a task. A site where the task actually gets done, with real prices, availability, opening hours and a contact or booking form, stands to gain from that; keeping your Google Business Profile complete is part of the same work.

Being cited still helps, even if it no longer brings the click it used to. In Seer Interactive’s data across 53 brands, a brand cited in an AI Overview got two to five times the organic click-through rate of one that was not cited, throughout 2025.

What Google tells website owners

Google’s documentation is short on this. There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode and no special optimisation: a page has to be indexed and eligible to be shown with a snippet, and then it can be used as a supporting link. You do not need new machine-readable files, AI text files or special schema, which is the same conclusion our guides to llms.txt and schema markup reached. Google’s newer guide to its AI features adds what does help: original content with a point of view of its own, crawlable and well-structured pages, and current product and business data.

Since 31 August 2026 there is also a switch. Under Settings in Search Console, the Search generative AI control lets any site exclude itself from AI Overviews, AI Mode and the AI features in Discover. Google says excluded sites get no traffic or impressions from those features, and that the setting is not used as a ranking signal for the rest of Search. It does not control AI training, which is still the job of Google-Extended. For most businesses, opting out means giving up the citation without getting the click back; the wider trade-off with AI bots is in what AI crawlers actually send back.

How to see AI Mode in Search Console

AI Mode traffic is not a separate line in your reports. Google counts it inside the normal Performance report, under the Web search type: a click on a link in AI Mode counts as a click, positions are counted as on an ordinary results page, and a follow-up question counts as a new query. The AI Mode visits are already in your Search Console totals, mixed in with everything else.

What is new is impressions. The generative AI performance report, announced on 3 June 2026 and available to all websites since 31 August 2026, shows how often links to your site appeared in AI Overviews and AI Mode, by page, country, device and date. It shows impressions, not clicks, and its help page lists no way to separate AI Mode from AI Overviews. Read it next to the Performance report: a page whose AI impressions rise while its clicks fall is a page whose answer is being read on Google instead of on your site. How quickly a new page starts to appear in AI answers is in how long until AI cites you.

The publishers’ complaints in Brussels

European publishers have taken the issue to the European Commission. The Independent Publishers Alliance filed a complaint about AI Overviews on 30 June 2025. On 9 December 2025 the Commission opened a formal antitrust investigation into whether Google uses publishers’ content for AI Overviews and AI Mode without paying for it and without a real way to refuse, and YouTube videos to train its models without fair terms. In February 2026 the European Publishers Council filed its own complaint about both features, asking for publisher control over AI use of their content, transparency and fair payment. Google said the complaint "risks stifling innovation in a market that is more competitive than ever."

The investigation has no deadline, and opening it does not decide the outcome. For a business website it changes nothing yet: the opt-out control launched in the UK first, where Google says it is engaging with the Competition and Markets Authority, not in the EU. Any remedy Brussels does impose, such as more control over how content is used in AI answers, would apply to every site Google indexes, not only to the publishers who complained.

What to do about it

Check which pages lose clicks before you decide that AI Mode is the problem. In Search Console, compare the last twelve months with the twelve before, page by page. If the losses are in guides and explainers while your service, product and contact pages hold steady, AI answers are the likely reason. If those are falling too, look first for another cause: a Google algorithm update, a redesign or a technical fault.

Then put the effort where the click still happens. Make the pages that complete a task, prices, availability, booking, a contact form, clear enough to be the official place Google sends people to, keep your product feeds and business profile current, and write the informational content you keep from your own experience, because that is what Google says it rewards. Count the result in enquiries and branded searches, not only in sessions. How to split a budget between classic SEO and AI visibility is in GEO vs SEO: where your budget should go, and how AI answers pick their sources in our guide to GEO. If you would rather go through your Search Console data with someone, that is where our SEO work starts.

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Sources

Dates and product details are from Google’s own announcements and documentation, read on 3 November 2026. Click figures are from the studies named, each with its own sample, country and period; none of them measured German or Romanian searches.

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