Google just dropped some big news at their yearly Google I/O conference – AI Mode is now rolling out to everyone in the US without having to opt in. This has a lot of people asking: should we really care about this?

In short, yes – but there’s more to the story.

How Google AI Mode Actually Works

First, let’s see how Google AI Mode works.

When you open Google.com, you’ll see AI Mode on the first display, allowing you to select whether you want to use “traditional” search with AI Overviews or use AI Mode.

After clicking on AI Mode, you’ll be able to ask detailed questions just the way you use ChatGPT.

The biggest change you’ll notice?

No blue links under the answer. Instead, you get a conversation-style response without the option to quickly jump to traditional search results with AI Overviews. This could mean fewer clicks to websites since users can’t easily browse through the search results they might normally click on.

It’s a change that can have massive potential impact.

However, fortunately enough for websites and people driving traffic to websites (including SEOs), AI Mode is NOT a default experience for most users. In addition to this, currently, this feature is limited to US users only.

So AI Mode is an add-on you can use and test, while you can still switch back to “Traditional Google” by clicking on a tab.

Evolution Instead of Revolution

Let’s be real – Google had to respond to ChatGPT becoming a serious threat. But they’ve got users of all ages and tech comfort levels, so they couldn’t just overhaul their entire search engine overnight.

That’s why they started by letting people test the Search Generative Experience (SGE) back in 2023, then slowly expanded AI Overviews to more and more countries, followed by waitlists for AI Mode, and now they’re making it available to everyone in the US.

The main selling point? Convenience. Instead of opening a new tab and typing “ChatGPT,” people can just click over to the AI Mode tab while staying in Google.

It’s too early to tell the potential impact of this feature, but in the later part of the article I will show you how you can use it in your strategy without putting all eggs into one basket.

Can AI Mode Really Take On ChatGPT?

The convenience factor is huge. If you’re already using Google (and who isn’t?), it’s super easy to just click over to AI Mode rather than going somewhere else.

Users searching on Google who want a chat experience no longer need to open a new tab and type “ChatGPT” – they can simply switch to the AI Mode tab and get chatbot-style answers without leaving Google.

As for which one gives better answers, it’s too early to say for sure, but Google seems to have some significant advantages:

They have a much bigger collection of web pages to pull from, which could mean more comprehensive answers. The scraping technology is more limiting for ChatGPT – typically ChatGPT will have issues with extracting content from JavaScript websites (and they are EXTREMELY common). Also, multiple websites just block ChatGPT from accessing their content altogether.
Google has decades of user interaction signals they can analyze against traditional search results.
They can leverage ranking signals they’ve developed and refined over 20+ years, while ChatGPT is relatively new to the search space.
AI Mode runs on Gemini 2.5 (Google confirmed this), while ChatGPT likely uses GPT-4o for free users.
In multiple benchmarks, Gemini 2.5 consistently scores better on both intelligence metrics and AI performance tests.
AI Mode automatically creates answers using recent web sources, but ChatGPT doesn’t always search the web for every question (to ensure the most up-to-date information).

Also, Google announced multiple features known from other platforms (such as Deep Research), personal context, or shopping mode.

My personal opinion is that it will be very difficult for ChatGPT to win over Google over time.

How AI Mode Is Different From AI Overviews

The biggest difference is that AI Mode tries to answer pretty much everything you ask, while AI Overviews is pickier. For example, if you just type “iPhone,” AI Overviews won’t generate an answer because it’s not clear what you want – are you shopping, looking for reviews, or interested in the history of iPhones?

They share the same engine used to generate answers (it’s Gemini 2.5). The way they work is similar – they see what are the best sources on a given topic and they generate the answer based on both internal knowledge of Gemini and the list of sources.

Currently, I don’t see massive differences in the output structure, but I suspect it will be a playground for Google to experiment with different approaches.

Logically, there should be one big difference: I assume that AI Mode has different goals and success metrics:

Whether the answer terminated the query (if yes, that’s likely considered successful)
Did the query make people ask follow-up questions (engagement metric)
Did the user click one of the sources? (citation engagement)

With the main current experience – AI Overviews – follow-up questions aren’t necessarily a KPI

Making AI Mode a separate product (likely intended at this phase for early market adopters) will let Google experiment more freely without disrupting their main search experience.

Additionally, now we can see that Google is actively recommending people to “Dive deeper in AI mode”. This can how many people click on search results.

AI summaries makes clicks less important

AI Summaries (be it AI OVerviews, AI Mode, or ChatGPT summaries) make clicks less important, especially for informaitonal queries.

If I type: “benefits of celery juice” I will be probably satisfied by the answer and no need to click as they are satisified.

AI changes the game. Google in their latest article: Top ways to ensure your content performs well in Google’s AI experiences on Search wrote: “(…) you might not optimize for these if you focus too much on clicks instead of the overall value of your visits from Search. Consider looking at various indicators of conversion on your site, be it sales, signups, a more engaged audience, or information lookups about your business”.

What This Means For Your Marketing Strategy

Google changes massively. Different interface, clicks are becoming less important.

One thing is crystal clear – conversational search is becoming a big deal. And this seems to be more natural for people to see AI answers rather than see blue links to top 10 search results.

More and more people will talk to Google like they talk to ChatGPT, getting direct answers from either AI Overviews or AI Mode.

This means you need to rethink your SEO strategy.

Part of it is query/prompt research.

If you run a marketing agency, you might have traditionally focused on keywords like “marketing,” “marketing agency,” and “marketing services.” But with AI search, you need to think about the actual questions your potential customers might ask.

The tricky part? These conversational queries probably won’t show up in Google Search Console or your typical keyword tools. So you’ll need to:

Think about each stage of your customer’s journey
Put yourself in their shoes and predict what questions they’d ask

At ZipTie we help mind the gap and generate these queries our our AI Assistant (beta).

Then you will be able to track your AI success score (if AI uses you as a source, does it mention you, and if so, in a positive, negative, or neutral way).

What To Do Now

Right now, there are no tools that will let you check how successful you are in Google AI Mode.

At ZipTie.dev, in our AI features, we’re currently tracking AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity. We’ll add Google AI Mode to our tracking once more people start using it regularly.

While I don’t have proof for this on a bigger scale, optimizing for AI Overviews might help with AI Mode too, since their underlying technology follows very similar logic in generating the output.

As all these AI search features keep evolving, staying on top of how they affect your online presence will be super important for making sure people can still find you in this increasingly AI-driven search world.

Personally, I will focus on AI Overviews mainly (as this is the biggest market of AI Search).

However, I will use AI Mode regularly, primarily for three things:

To experience how it differs from AI Overviews, ChatGPT (to stay on top of the trends)
To understand what factors are important for Google when AI Overviews is not available
To assess potential risks for SEOs & content creators whose primary source of income was from Google Search engine