The way people search is changing radically. Google, Bing and other search engines increasingly place an AI answer on top of the classic results. This AI Mode answers the question directly, sometimes without the user clicking a link at all. For your visibility, your click behaviour and your SEO, that has major consequences. In this article: how AI Mode works, what changes in the way people search and buy, and what you can do right now to stay visible.
What is AI Mode?
AI Mode is the search experience where artificial intelligence generates a direct answer to your query, instead of just showing ten blue links. It builds on AI Overviews and makes search conversational: you can ask follow-up questions, refine and compare in an environment that feels like ChatGPT or Gemini. Google introduced this mode in 2024 and has been expanding it quickly since. The AI block appears above the regular results, sometimes with clickable sources, sometimes without. For the user it’s comfortable; for brands it means the battle for attention shifts to that one answer at the top.
The classic funnel is changing
The familiar customer journey, with separate stages from awareness to loyalty, is getting shorter and more erratic. Where someone used to search, visit a few sites and compare for themselves, that now often happens in one continuous conversation with an AI. The user asks a question, gets a comparison, asks follow-ups and reaches a decision, all without leaving the search engine. For brands this means you no longer have to stand out at one single moment, but need to stay relevant and trustworthy throughout the whole conversation. The AI also remembers context, so a good first impression carries over into later questions. That makes your own audience more important: people who already know your brand and look it up directly do not depend on how an algorithm summarises the conversation.
The impact: fewer clicks, more zero-click
The biggest effect is that people more often get their answer without clicking through. According to Rand Fishkin of SparkToro , AI Overviews cause a drop of up to 60% in the click-through rate of the top organic results. SEO expert Gianluca Fiorelli warns that this effect grows exponentially for informational and factual queries with AI Mode. At the same time, AI often picks a handful of dominant sources: research by Authoritas shows that only a small share of AI answers link to more than five sources. If you’re not among them, you get skipped, even if you rank number one. Being visible is therefore no longer the same as being found.
In practice, the gap is often not where brands expect it. For a strong brand we measure, the name comes up in almost every answer to brand questions: ask about the brand and the brand appears. But ask the question one step earlier, when someone is still orienting and does not mention the brand name, and that share drops to less than half. So brand awareness is not the problem. Presence in the phase before it is.
“AI is moving from giving answers to doing things. The question is no longer just whether a model reads your content, but whether an agent can work with it.”
Giacomo Perticara, founder and SEO strategist at GRP Digital
What changes for SEO?
SEO is shifting from keywords to entities, authority and information quality. AI groups content around entities (brands, products, locations), not exact keywords. Danny Sullivan of Google puts it this way: Google trains its models not just to answer questions, but to represent the most authoritative voices on a topic. That makes E-E-A-T and topical authority more important than ever. It’s less about perfect keyword density and more about the question: are you a source a model can cite with confidence?
What you can do now
- Think in entities: make sure search engines and AI know exactly who you are, what you do and where you’re authoritative.
- Add structured data (JSON-LD); pages without structured data are rarely shown as a source.
- Deliver information gain: add unique insights, data or examples instead of repeating what is already everywhere.
- Build topical authority and E-E-A-T, so you become the go-to source on your subject.
- Make sure AI can read your content; many AI crawlers and agents see only raw HTML.
- Monitor which queries trigger an AI answer and who gets named as a source.
Measuring remains a challenge for now
Traffic from AI Mode isn’t always passed on cleanly to analytics yet. Google confirmed a no-referrer issue; John Mueller indicated a fix is coming. Until then, add annotations to your analytics around release moments and keep an eye on your direct traffic, so you don’t miss shifts. Don’t wait for perfect numbers to start: the brands building visibility now will be out front later.
SEO is not dead. But you’ll have to deploy it differently.
Giacomo Perticara, founder and SEO strategist at GRP Digital
Not a new field, but a shift
AI Mode doesn’t mean the end of SEO. It’s a shift within the same field: from keyword-focused to context- and knowledge-focused. The foundation stays clear, reliable, well-structured content. Want to know how to get actively mentioned in those AI answers? Then read how Generative Engine Optimization works.
Curious how visible your brand is now that AI gives the first answer? At GRP Digital we map it and turn it into concrete growth.
