Google AI Mode and zero-click search

Google AI Mode is a Search tab that answers with a Gemini-written conversation instead of a list of results. It launched in Spain on October 8, 2025. It cites few sources, and in our test almost none of them matched the top classic results for the same search.

It's been a year since Google switched AI Mode on in Spain, and most guides that rank for it explain what it is, that Gemini runs it, and how to turn it on. Few look at what it does with the websites it draws from. On October 6, 2026, we ran five questions from our own field through AI Mode, signed out, and logged which sources each answer cited. Then we checked them against that day's organic results. Of the thirteen sources it listed, at most two were among the top classic results. One answer showed no sources at all. In another, the first source was one of our own articles, which didn't appear in the top 20 organic results. This article covers what AI Mode is, how it differs from AI Overviews, what the data says about clicks, and what changes for a B2B website.

What is Google AI Mode?

AI Mode is Google's conversational search experience: you type, speak, or photograph a question and get an answer written by Gemini, with links to the pages it consulted and the option to keep asking in the same thread. You open it from the "AI Mode" button on the results page, from google.com/ai, or from the Google app on Android and iOS. Under the hood, Google breaks the question into subtopics and runs several searches at once before it writes the answer. Google's Spanish blog describes a technique that "breaks your question down into a series of subtopics and launches a burst of simultaneous queries." In English it's known as query fan-out. That's why AI Mode handles long questions with conditions attached: according to Google, the queries it gets are two to three times longer than traditional searches.

For a business, the practical difference is what the user sees. In classic search, each site competes for a position and the user decides which one to open. In AI Mode, the user reads an answer that's already written, and websites show up as its sources, in a side panel or in collapsed cards under the text. In our test, the answers that had sources showed three or four of them, tucked behind a "Show all" button. All five ended by inviting the next question inside Google. That design is why AI Mode comes up in every conversation about zero-click search: the question, the answer, and the follow-up all happen on the same screen, without a visit to any website.

When did AI Mode launch in Spain?

On October 8, 2025. That day Google's Spanish blog, in a post by Lino Cattaruzzi, VP of Google Iberia, announced AI Mode in Spanish as part of an expansion to 36 new languages and nearly 50 countries and territories. The announcement describes a new button on the results page and in the Google app for Android and iOS, plus voice and camera search. AI Overviews, the generated summary that sits above the results, had reached Spain six and a half months earlier, on March 25, 2025, as we covered in our guide to Google AI Overviews. Since October 2025, then, a user in Spain has two different AI features in the same search engine: one that appears on its own above the results, and one they have to choose by tapping a button.

Search demand in Spain already uses the Spanish name. According to OpenSEO, with Google Spain data from October 6, 2026, "modo ia google" gets 18,100 searches a month with an organic keyword difficulty (KD) of 0 out of 100, and "google modo ia" another 4,400. The English form "ai mode google" gets 1,000 searches at KD 40. In the US, "google ai mode" gets 301,000 searches a month. People in Spain who want to know how this works ask in Spanish, and the pages ranking for those searches today are mostly general news stories from October 2025 announcing the launch. For anyone running a company website, the useful question by now is how much of their audience uses AI Mode and which sources it cites when they do. That's what we measured below.

How is AI Mode different from AI Overviews?

They differ in who decides they appear and in how they're presented: Google shows an AI Overview on its own above the results, while the user chooses AI Mode, which replaces the results page with a conversation. They share technology. Google Search Central documentation says both can use query fan-out and that there are no additional requirements or special optimizations needed to appear in either one, beyond being indexed and eligible to show with a snippet. They also share a measurement blind spot. Traffic from either feature is added to the "Web" search type in the Search Console Performance report, with no filter to separate it from the rest.

The difference that matters most for a website is how much room the format leaves. An AI Overview takes the top of the page, but organic results, ads, and the other modules still sit below it, and a user can scroll past it. AI Mode has no list underneath: the answer is the whole page, and its sources are the only link back to the open web. There's no record that they handle ads the same way either. Google Ads Help on ads in AI Overviews (answer 16297775) limits them to English and twelve countries, none of them in Europe, and doesn't mention AI Mode anywhere. If a campaign can appear inside an AI Mode answer in Spain, that help page doesn't say so.

What is zero-click search, and how big is it?

A zero-click search is one that ends on Google's own page without a visit to any website, because the answer was already on screen. The strongest public data on how AI summaries change this comes from a Pew Research Center study published in July 2025. It analyzed 68,879 real Google searches by 900 US adults during March 2025. When the page showed an AI summary, users clicked a traditional result on 8% of visits; without one, on 15%. Clicks on links inside the summary itself happened on 1% of visits. And users ended their browsing session on that same page 26% of the time with a summary, versus 16% without one.

That data has three limits worth stating before you use it. It's from the US, it's from March 2025, and it measures AI Overviews, because AI Mode wasn't open to the public when it was collected. No equivalent study has been published on AI Mode in Spain. What you can reason about is the direction. If a few-line summary above the results already cuts organic clicks nearly in half in that sample, a feature that replaces the whole page and suggests the next question won't send more visits per search. Google's documentation says clicks from pages with AI features are higher quality, and in our AI Overviews guide we explain why that claim is about quality, not volume.

Which sources does AI Mode cite? A five-search test

In our October 6, 2026 test, AI Mode listed thirteen sources across five answers, and at most two of them were among the top organic results for the same search. We ran the five questions from Barcelona, signed out, with optional cookies rejected and Google set to Spanish for Spain. For each answer we opened the full source list and checked it against the classic results page that same day, which we pulled twice with OpenSEO. In the first pull, ten elements deep, two sources matched; in the second, twenty deep, none did, because the classic page itself had changed. AI Mode also changes its answers between users and days, so the table describes a moment, not a law. Even so, it shows three things none of the guides we read mention.

First, organic rank doesn't predict the citation. For "what is GEO in marketing," AI Mode cited UNIR, IEBS, EAE Barcelona, and HubSpot, and none of the four was in the top twenty classic results. Second, an answer can cite no one. For "difference between SEO and SEM," AI Mode wrote an explanation, table included, and showed no sources, so that search can't send a visit to anyone from the answer. The third one is close to home. For "how to tell if ChatGPT cites my website," the first source was our guide on how to check whether ChatGPT cites your site, which wasn't in the top 20 organic results that day.

What does AI Mode change for a B2B website?

It changes the unit of competition: AI Mode picks passages that answer one of the subquestions it splits the query into, so the page that answers each subquestion completely and findably wins, even if it isn't the best-ranked. B2B companies live on long searches with conditions ("time-tracking software for companies with more than 50 employees that integrates with payroll"), exactly the kind of question AI Mode breaks apart. The guide that got cited has that shape: each section opens with the answer, lists checkable steps, and makes sense without the rest of the page. It's the logic of SEO for AI, the one summed up in our guide to what GEO is, and the basis of the generative engine optimization (GEO) service we run for clients: write so a passage can be cited on its own, and measure whether anyone cites it.

The second consequence is that you have to measure differently. Search Console doesn't separate AI Mode traffic, but it does show its footprint. In our own report for the last three months there are queries no person types that way, such as "what are the best content practices to appear as a cited source in google search's ai mode?", or a long question that ends with a bracketed instruction about the response language. They read like instructions to a model, and they fit the query fan-out Google describes, although Search Console doesn't say which system sent them. They're a handful of impressions, but enough to add a metric next to rank: which answers you show up in, counted with the method in our citation measurement guide or with a free AI visibility checker.

Can you stop AI Mode from using your content?

You can limit it with the same controls that govern snippets in classic search, but you can't opt out of AI Mode without also losing visibility in Google. Search Central documentation lists nosnippet, data-nosnippet, and max-snippet to restrict what text is shown, and noindex to keep a page out entirely. Each of them acts on classic results at the same time: a page with no snippet looks worse in the regular list, and a page with noindex disappears from both. The same documentation points to Google-Extended for limiting use of content in training and grounding for other Google systems, not for withdrawing from AI features in Search. For a company that depends on being found, the practical decision runs the other way: which pages you want AI Mode to read and cite, and with what first-party data.

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