Discover how Google's new AI Mode is transforming search, replacing traditional links with an AI-driven experience. Learn about its features, the debate over its impact on SEO, and why SEO is set to evolve, not die.
Although AI is evolving at an unprecedented rate, it’s not new technology. Most of us have been using it for over a decade now, letting our children use it, building and growing businesses with it - search engines. Whether you love or hate AI, if you’ve been Googling, you’ve been using AI and it’s all about to massively change.
For decades, we’ve all taken Google Search for granted. You type something in, hit enter, and a list of blue links appears. That's the way it's always worked. But AI is changing everything (again), and Google's new AI Mode is the biggest shift we've seen yet. It’s a complete overhaul of the search experience, and it's already rolled out to U.S. users. This isn't just a minor update; it's a full-on reimagining of how we find information online, and it has some big implications for your business.
You may remember Google's Search Generative Experience (SGE), which was a lab experiment with similar technology. That evolved into AI Overviews, which you've likely seen at the top of your search results. AI Overviews give you a quick, AI-generated summary before you ever see a link. Google says these overviews are one of their most successful launches in the past decade, with users searching more often and being happier with their results.
Now, Google is taking that a step further with AI Mode. Unlike AI Overviews, which live alongside traditional links, AI Mode replaces them entirely. It’s a new tab on the search bar that gives you an end-to-end AI experience, effectively creating a miniature article to answer your question. Google's head of search, Liz Reid, has been very clear about this: "This is the future of Google Search".
AI Mode is powered by a custom version of Google’s Gemini 2.5 model and a fancy technique called "query fan-out". Instead of just running one search, the AI breaks your question into subtopics and runs hundreds of searches at once.
This lets it dive deeper into the web to find "hyper-relevant" content. This new mode comes with a bunch of other features:
We’re all getting used to AI now, especially those of us who are using it on a daily basis. But one of the core concepts of AI is that it’s new and innovative, which means the terminology needs to move at lightspeed just like the technology.
We understand generative AI - the AI that generates something for us like text or an image or video (or that report you forgot was due EOP Friday).
What we now need is agentic AI - the AI that can do lots of different tasks for us at once. For example, take our SalesApe AI sales agents. They can talk to your potential customers, qualify leads, hand them over to human SDRs and make sure you’ve got a report to see exactly how they’re performing. You don’t need to ask them to do each task, one at a time, they’re programmed to mimic a real human member of staff and take care of multiple tasks at once (our AI Sales reps just don’t need a coffee break!)
The SEO community is in a heated debate about what this means. On one hand, some experts believe AI Mode will have a "devastating impact on the internet". The worry is that if Google gives you the answer directly, you’ll have no reason to click through to a website. This would severely cut into the revenue of millions of websites that rely on organic search traffic.
Did you know…
Studies already show that AI Overviews can reduce a website’s click-through rate by as much as 30% to 70%.
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A spokesperson for HouseFresh, a website that reviews air quality products, highlights this problem perfectly: they've seen their impressions (the number of times they appear on Google) go up, but their clicks go down. It's clear people are seeing their content in an AI-generated summary, but they aren't visiting the site itself.
On the other hand, Google insists that these concerns are "overblown". They say they send billions of clicks to websites every day and that AI Overviews actually send "higher quality" traffic because users spend more time on the links they do click. Nick Fox, Google’s senior VP of knowledge and information, argues that "the web is thriving" and that Google cares more about its health than any other company.
I’ve worked in the search space for nearly two decades and this section here is how you can tell this isn’t an AI generated article. I have (on very rare occasions) been accused of being slightly cynical, my glass might not be half empty, but it’s probably going to be at some point.
Is AI Mode going to kill off search? No!
And why not? Because Google isn’t an altruistic, charitable force of benevolence no matter what it would like you to believe.
It doesn’t spend billions of dollars researching and developing, or buying the best talent and tech it can get its wallet on because it wants humanity to know who won the Super Bowl 2025 or if you can “has cheezburger”. No, it spends all that money because it makes Google money. Yes, there’s money in data and keeping people on its search page, whether traditional SERPs, AI Overviews or AI Mode and yes that data is lucrative. But businesses are spending billions because Google sends them traffic.
Google is in the business of sending traffic to websites. Behind all the maps and streetview, behind all the YouTube videos and Home Assistants, Google can charge the money it does because it attracts the largest volumes of traffic which it will sell onto you. So long as paid traffic exists, so will organic and SEO will live to search another day.
Another reason AI isn’t going to kill SEO is because we’re not just optimizing content, we’re optimizing websites. Google AI Mode or AI Overviews can tell me that the answer to the ultimate question of life is 42, it can tell me the winning lotto numbers, but if I’m actually looking to make a purchase or sign up to a service, I want a website. Yes, Google Shopping and paid ads have come a long way, but if I’m looking for a local dog walker or a new pair of sneakers, I’m clicking through to a website. I don’t think I’m alone and therefore, I don’t think SEO will be killed off by AI, it’s just going to evolve into Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) or Large Language Model Optimization (LLMO).
It's a valid question. Are we just using AI for creating content for AI to read, which is then summarized by AI for us to read? It's a bit of an ouroboros, isn't it? The consensus among many in the industry is that this marks a new era called the "machine web". It’s a world where websites are built for AI to read, and summaries from chatbots become the main way we consume information.
Google has long stated its preference for specific formats in text. It loves lists and bullet points, short sentences and shorter paragraphs with important keywords highlighted and its mania for FAQ style content has been focused on for years.
So, is this the death of SEO? Not exactly. It's more of a radical transformation. The "simple bargain" that the web was built on—where sites give Google content in exchange for traffic—is crumbling. The task is no longer just about getting a click; it’s about making sure your content is the authoritative source that Google’s AI chooses to summarize. In this new world, the old advice still holds true: create the best, most helpful content possible. The difference is, now you're not just writing for a human audience; you’re also writing for the AI that's going to tell them about it. For a lot of publishers, it will be a race to be the most trustworthy source in a game with new rules. The next year or so will likely mark the end of an era online, but as one expert puts it, "The web is still there and it's still open. If Google goes this way, something will happen."
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