What is Google AI Mode?
Published . Updated .
AI Mode: Google Search's conversational mode that answers harder, multi-part questions with a generated reply and links, running many related searches behind it.
Google describes AI Mode as the place for deeper reasoning and comparisons, where AI Overviews give a summary at the top of ordinary results. Google's own guidance says both may use a query fan-out technique, running many related searches across subtopics before writing the answer. The technique is explained in what is query fan-out.
Google says a page needs nothing special to be a supporting link: it has to be indexed and eligible to show with a snippet, with no extra file or markup. Only Fan Out does not read AI Mode; it reads ChatGPT, Claude and Grok.
Read next
- What is query fan-out?
- What are Google AI Overviews?
- How do ChatGPT, Claude and Grok search the web?
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See the fan-out for your own prompts
Only Fan Out is a free Chrome side panel that lists the queries, fetched pages and cited pages behind each ChatGPT, Claude or Grok answer. Nothing leaves your browser.
Add to Chrome, it's free