Knowledge base v2.13.0 · Community edition · data through 2 October 2026
Thing · Feature
Google Search's conversational AI mode for longer questions and follow-ups, answered with query fan-out and grounding on the Search index.
Glossary · AI Mode
Google Search's AI mode, where users ask longer questions (about three times as long as a traditional search on average, a Google slide said; the opening keynote said two to three times) and follow-up questions. It uses the same crawling and index as Search and adds grounding and query fan-out when it answers.
Documented in
The Search generative AI control covers AI Overviews, AI Mode and generative AI features in Discover. Excluding removes both links to the site and use of its content to ground answers.
Google Search Console Help · Day 1 · What's new in the world of Search
Google's AI features guide says a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet to appear as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode, with no additional technical requirements.
Google Search Central · Day 2 · Controlling indexing
Google's robots meta tag specification says the nosnippet rule also prevents a page's content from being used as a direct input for AI Overviews and AI Mode, and max-snippet also limits how much of it may be used that way.
Google Search Central · Day 2 · How does the index look like?
Google says query fan-out in AI Overviews and AI Mode issues related searches across subtopics and several data sources, which for AI Mode include the Knowledge Graph and shopping data as well as web content (AI Mode launch post, March 2025).
Google Search Central, Google blog (5 March 2025) · Day 2 · How does the index look like?
Google's Trends FAQ says Google Trends filters out searches made by Google products and services, including the internal searches made by AI Mode and AI Overviews.
Google Trends Help · Day 2 · Google Trends
Google's Search Console help says AI Mode groups the user's question into subtopics and searches for each one simultaneously, and that a follow-up question in AI Mode is essentially a new query.
Google Search Console Help · Day 3 · Making sense of users' queries
Google's AI features guide says there are no additional requirements, and no special schema.org structured data, needed to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode; a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown with a snippet.
Google Search Central · Day 3 · How Search results are born
On 11 January 2026 Google announced 'dozens of new data attributes' in Merchant Center for conversational commerce on AI Mode, Gemini and Business Agent, to roll out first with a small group of retailers.
Google blog (11 January 2026) · Day 3 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue links
Google's Merchant Center help marks the question_and_answer, document_link, related_product and popularity_rank attributes as primarily intended for conversational experiences such as AI Mode in Google Search.
Google Merchant Center Help · Day 3 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue links
Google's 16 September 2026 holiday shopping post says that in testing with lululemon, conversational attributes submitted by the brand were used 50% of the time in relevant product recommendations in AI Mode.
Google blog (16 September 2026) · Day 3 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue links
Google's AI features guide says traffic from sites appearing in AI features such as AI Overviews and AI Mode is included in the overall search traffic in Search Console and reported in the Performance report within the Web search type.
Google Search Central · Day 3 · Lightning session L: Understanding SERPs and your users
Google's AI Mode launch post (March 2025) said that with Google's new AI features people are using Google Search more than ever, as they get help with new and more complex questions.
Google blog (5 March 2025) · Day 3 · Mastering the messy middle
Slide and stage claims that name it, the ones Google’s documentation does not cover first.
Google said it offers users a choice between AI Mode, AI Overviews and traditional search rather than focusing on one experience.
Lino Cattaruzzi · Day 1 · Welcome and opening keynotes
Google said 77% of users of AI Overviews and AI Mode are able to make decisions faster because of them.
Lino Cattaruzzi · Day 1 · Welcome and opening keynotes
AI Mode queries have doubled every quarter since launch.
The average AI Mode query is about 3 times the length of a traditional search (the opening keynote's slide and its speaker said two to three times).
One in six AI Mode searches is multimodal, using voice or images.
Follow-up queries in AI Mode have grown by more than 40% per month on average in the US since launch.
Google describes four new ways people search in AI Mode: Explore (brainstorming queries, grown 30% faster than AI Mode queries overall in the US since launch), Learn (study guides, deep dives), Decide (searches beginning with 'which', up 40% faster than AI Mode queries overall in the past six months) and Do (planning queries, up 80% faster than AI Mode queries overall in the past six months).
Search Agents in AI Mode let users set standing requests for updates, such as being told when a product goes on sale, a team wins or a price drops below a level.
Google listed eight ways AI Search helps users find and visit websites: preferred sources expansion, fresh perspectives and prominent links, subscription content, in-line quotes in AI Mode and AI Overviews, rich linking and embedded web, context on content sources, 'Highly Cited' labels and Search profiles.
Sites that users mark as a preferred source are more visible in Top Stories and are labelled in AI Mode and AI Overviews.
Google said Search agents in AI Mode had launched globally a day or two before 30 September 2026.
Gary Illyes · Day 1 · What's new in the world of Search
AI Overviews and AI Mode launched as fairly text-heavy answers with little image content and few tables, and they have become more structured over time because that is what users want.
Day 2 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.
Google's headline finding was that people who use AI features such as AI Mode or AI Overviews feel much more confident about their purchase decisions.
Google said AI Overviews and AI Mode are integrated into one seamless AI experience in Search.
Lino Cattaruzzi · Day 1 · Welcome and opening keynotes
Google said its AI-powered responses in Search alone, AI Overviews and AI Mode, send more than a billion clicks per week to the web.
Lino Cattaruzzi · Day 1 · Welcome and opening keynotes
Google said AI Mode is growing almost exponentially and that people are searching more because of it, not less.
Gary Illyes · Day 1 · What's new in the world of Search
Google said a multi-part query, such as a white three-row SUV for two teenagers and a car-sick dog, cannot be satisfied by a list of links because no single article covers every aspect, while AI Overviews and AI Mode can synthesise an answer that helps users decide where to go.
Gary Illyes · Day 1 · What's new in the world of Search
A Search agent is set up by typing a natural-language request, which AI Mode interprets to create an alert; Google called this an information agent.
Gary Illyes · Day 1 · What's new in the world of Search
AI Mode and AI Overviews use the same crawling and the same index as Search. At serving they add grounding on the Search index and query fan-out.
AI Overviews and AI Mode may have extra processes of their own, like any other search feature, but the bulk of their processing is the same as for normal Search.
Gary Illyes · Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?
AI Mode is a feature that sits on top of Google's existing crawling infrastructure, so Google does not crawl a site more because of AI Mode.
John Mueller said Google uses the snippet as a way of building AI Overviews and AI Mode answers, so if a page forbids a snippet, Google cannot use that snippet for them.
John Mueller · Day 2 · Controlling indexing
AI Overviews and AI Mode are built on top of Search results: they are a different experience of the same content Google already has.
Erin Sparling · Day 2 · Lightning session D: Rendering and JavaScript
AI Overviews and AI Mode typically do not ground their answers by reading pages live, unlike Gemini when a user asks about a specific page, Google said.
Erin Sparling · Day 2 · Lightning session D: Rendering and JavaScript
The structured data Google processes is not fed very differently to AI Overviews and AI Mode: after cleaning and quality work, the same data goes to both the classic results page and the AI features.
Day 2 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.
AI Overviews and AI Mode use the same index structures and token-based snippets as classic web results, a point Google called important but not obvious.
Google said that when AI Overviews or AI Mode run a query fan-out, the generated queries are sent to Google's Search index and documents come back with their snippets, which then feed the AI-generated answer (part of this passage is unclear in the recording).
Google's generative AI features in Search build on the traditional ways of searching, so query understanding also flows into AI Overviews and AI Mode.
John Mueller · Day 3 · Making sense of users' queries
Google said that if AI Mode one day showcases images, recipes or similar elements, those parts would need structured data, but in their current form AI Mode and AI Overviews require pretty much nothing extra.
In AI Mode, shoppers keep asking deeper, more nuanced follow-up questions about brands and products, so AI Mode must return much more detailed product information than classic shopping results needed.
Alex Jansen · Day 3 · Shopping on Search: Beyond the blue links
Nik Vujic said GA4 setups that separate out traffic from LLMs do not capture visits from AI Overviews and AI Mode.
Nik Vujic · Day 3 · Lightning session L: Understanding SERPs and your users
AI Overviews and AI Mode are built on the Search infrastructure Google has used for 25 to 30 years and have very few processes of their own.
Gary Illyes · Day 3 · Wrapping all up: AI, Search, and making sense of everything.
Google presented Web Guide as an alternative to AI Mode: it groups the search results into categories with a short summary for each, while the classic text results remain.
Gary Illyes · Day 3 · Wrapping all up: AI, Search, and making sense of everything.
Google said AI Mode alone has more than one billion monthly active users.
Lino Cattaruzzi · Day 1 · Welcome and opening keynotes
Search Console has a property setting called Search generative AI that gives direct control over AI Overviews and AI Mode without affecting web rankings. Its states are inherit from parent, include and exclude.
AI Overviews and AI Mode work together: a user can start with an AI Overview and continue the conversation in AI Mode.
Gary Illyes · Day 1 · What's new in the world of Search
The nosnippet rule also prevents a page's content from being used as a direct input for AI Overviews and AI Mode in Search.
John Mueller · Day 2 · Controlling indexing
John Mueller said, hedging with 'I think', that the max-snippet limit also applies to AI Overviews and AI Mode.
John Mueller · Day 2 · Controlling indexing
Setting the Search generative AI control in Search Console to exclude keeps a site's links and content out of Search generative AI features such as AI Overviews and AI Mode, so the site gets no traffic or impressions from them; include is the default.
John Mueller · Day 2 · Controlling indexing
Sites need no extra work to appear in AI Overviews and AI Mode: both work on top of the existing web results, so what works for web results also works for the AI features.
AI Mode and AI Overviews are not rich results but standard search features: they need no structured data to function and work with the normal text results from Google's index.
Google framed AI Mode and AI Overviews as combining the trust and real-world information of Google Search with the conversational power of an AI chatbot.
Lino Cattaruzzi · Day 1 · Welcome and opening keynotes
An audience member asked, in questions submitted before the event, how often Googlebot should be expected to visit a site now that AI Mode has rolled out, and whether AI means more crawling.
From the audience · Day 1 · How Google thinks about crawl budget
A community speaker argued that the change in search behaviour is not only longer AI Mode queries but conversation: a follow-up such as 'compare these two' relies on the context of earlier turns.
Jovana Avramovic · Day 1 · Lightning session C: Crawling
A search marketing agency reported on 29 September 2026 that Google's VP of Product for Search announced on X, on 28 September 2026, that AI Mode information monitoring was rolling out to everyone globally in the Google app; Google's I/O 2026 post had launched information agents first for AI Pro and Ultra subscribers in summer 2026.
Relevant Audience (29 September 2026), Google blog (19 May 2026) · Day 1 · What's new in the world of Search
With one in six AI Mode searches being multimodal, original images with descriptive file names, alt text and captions feed AI answers as well as image search.
Ibrahim Anjro · Day 1 · session not recorded
nofollow is a link-graph hint for search engines, not an access control: to keep AI crawlers away from content, use robots.txt rules for the specific crawlers; at Google, Google-Extended covers Gemini training and grounding, and the Search generative AI control covers AI Overviews and AI Mode.
Ibrahim Anjro · Day 2 · Controlling indexing
Before adding nosnippet or a low max-snippet value, weigh the cost in AI features: both limit how much of the page AI Overviews and AI Mode can use, and John Mueller described those answers as built from snippets.
Ibrahim Anjro · Day 2 · Controlling indexing
Check AI Overviews and AI Mode with native-language queries in each target market, not with translated English keywords, and compare with the country breakdown of Search Console's generative AI performance report; topics where competitors are cited and you are not point to missing or weak local content.
Ibrahim Anjro · Day 2 · Focusing on Internationalisation and Localisation
There is no separate AI index to optimise for: when a page never shows up as a source in AI Overviews or AI Mode, first check that it is indexed, that no nosnippet rule blocks its snippet and that the site is not excluded in Search Console's generative AI setting, the eligibility conditions Google lists.
Ibrahim Anjro · Day 2 · How does the index look like?
Treat nosnippet, data-nosnippet and max-snippet as AI visibility settings too: Google lists them as the controls for content in AI features, and if AI answers are built from index snippets, as Google said on stage, a blocked or shortened snippet leaves AI Overviews and AI Mode less to use.
Ibrahim Anjro · Day 2 · How does the index look like?
No Google documentation states that fan-out queries stay out of Search Console, but the docs fit the stage statement: the Performance report counts AI Overviews and AI Mode under the user's own queries, and the Generative AI reports have no query dimension.
Ibrahim Anjro · Day 3 · Making sense of users' queries
Day 2 said the structured data Google processes also feeds AI Overviews and AI Mode (D2-C476), while Day 3 said these features do not need structured data to function: markup is not a condition for appearing in AI features, but data taken from it can still reach them.
Ibrahim Anjro · Day 3 · How Search results are born
Search Console's generative AI performance reports count impressions only, with no clicks and no query dimension (Google documents the Search report for AI Overviews and AI Mode, plus a separate Discover report), so measure visits that follow AI answers with your own analytics.
Ibrahim Anjro · Day 3 · Inside Search Console: What’s New & How to Use It
Kit items about AI Mode: their own words name it, or several of the claims they rest on do.
Keep pages indexable and snippet-eligible, the whole technical requirement for AI features
Rests on 5 claims, 4 of them naming AI Mode; its own words name AI Mode
Spend no effort on llms.txt, AI text files or AI-specific markup for Google
Rests on 15 claims, 4 of them naming AI Mode; its own words name AI Mode
Do not add nosnippet or a short max-snippet unless you accept losing snippets and AI feature use
Rests on 6 claims, 4 of them naming AI Mode; its own words name AI Mode
Rests on 6 claims, 3 of them naming AI Mode; its own words name AI Mode
Track AI feature visibility in the Generative AI performance report
Rests on 11 claims, 3 of them naming AI Mode; its own words name AI Mode
Rests on 13 claims, 2 of them naming AI Mode; its own words name AI Mode
Rests on 2 claims, 1 of them naming AI Mode; its own words name AI Mode
Also instory angle A-001glossary terms AI Mode, Search agents (information agents), Search generative AI control, AI Overviews, Conversational attributes, Grounding, max-snippet, nosnippet and data-nosnippet, Rich results, Search features, Web Guide
AI Mode and AI Overviews use the same crawling and the same index as Search. At serving they add grounding on the Search index and query fan-out.
AI Mode and AI Overviews use the same crawling and the same index as Search. At serving they add grounding on the Search index and query fan-out.
Google said that when AI Overviews or AI Mode run a query fan-out, the generated queries are sent to Google's Search index and documents come back with their snippets, which then feed the AI-generated answer (part of this passage is unclear in the recording).
Google says query fan-out in AI Overviews and AI Mode issues related searches across subtopics and several data sources, which for AI Mode include the Knowledge Graph and shopping data as well as web content (AI Mode launch post, March 2025).
John Mueller said Google uses the snippet as a way of building AI Overviews and AI Mode answers, so if a page forbids a snippet, Google cannot use that snippet for them.
AI Overviews and AI Mode use the same index structures and token-based snippets as classic web results, a point Google called important but not obvious.
Google said that when AI Overviews or AI Mode run a query fan-out, the generated queries are sent to Google's Search index and documents come back with their snippets, which then feed the AI-generated answer (part of this passage is unclear in the recording).
The Search generative AI control covers AI Overviews, AI Mode and generative AI features in Discover. Excluding removes both links to the site and use of its content to ground answers.
Setting the Search generative AI control in Search Console to exclude keeps a site's links and content out of Search generative AI features such as AI Overviews and AI Mode, so the site gets no traffic or impressions from them; include is the default.
Search Console's generative AI performance reports count impressions only, with no clicks and no query dimension (Google documents the Search report for AI Overviews and AI Mode, plus a separate Discover report), so measure visits that follow AI answers with your own analytics.
Google's AI features guide says traffic from sites appearing in AI features such as AI Overviews and AI Mode is included in the overall search traffic in Search Console and reported in the Performance report within the Web search type.
Things named in the same claim, with the number of claims they share.