AI Mode

AI Mode is Google's fully conversational search, where the whole results page is an AI answer you can ask follow-up questions of.

It's a separate mode rather than a box on the normal results page, so someone has to choose it.

It goes further than AI Overviews by breaking your question into several searches behind the scenes and combining what it finds.

Citations appear as links within the answer, and there are fewer of them than a normal results page carries.

Being cited here depends on the same things as anywhere else: the page has to be indexed, readable without running JavaScript, and say something specific.

There's no separate markup or file that gets you in, and anyone selling one is selling something that doesn't exist.

What this means for you

Worth tracking rather than chasing. The work that gets you cited in AI Mode is the same work that ranks the page, which is the useful part of the news.

This one sits under AI search.

Related terms

AI Overview

An AI Overview is the AI-written answer Google places at the top of the results page, above the normal links.

Answer engine citation

An answer engine citation is ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews, Gemini, Perplexity or Copilot quoting your site as a source in an answer.

llms.txt

llms.txt is a proposed file you place on your site to tell AI models how to read it, and there is no evidence any of them do.

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