Are you all ready, there’s yet another update to the AI Saga. 

With the rollout of AI Mode, it offers an even deeper look into what the future of Search and AI overviews may look like. 

The program is sign up only and it’s only in its first couple of days since launch, but it doesn’t change the fact that it helps us understand what may be the keys to success and visibility.

The focus of my initial research was through the lens of our clients. Most of our clients are B2B companies who are selling professional services and/or high ticket technology products. Therefore, I wanted to try simulating in my searches our client’s potential end user who may be looking for a particular solution. 

Here are the findings and observations that we have found so far. 

1. Interface Completely Abandons Traditional 10 Blue Link Search Results

While it was entirely expected that this new AI Mode would move away from traditional search results, it still was exciting to see how a new era of Google search could look. 

Below was one of the first searches I did, and you can see what the new search looks like.

As you can see above, the search result looks like an expanded version of the AI Overview and is displayed in a format that mirrors those of the other LLM’s like ChatGPT, Claude & Perplexity. Because of the use of citations, I actually believe that Google’s AI Mode most closely resembles that of Perplexity. 

Below the AI Summary, you will not see any traditional blue link search results, the only “results” in that fashion are going to be the citations in the top right menu.

And when looking at the response that is returned by AI Mode, the generated response is much more thorough than that of AI Overview. To be exact:

AI Mode: 266 Words

AI Overview: 183 Words

That is about a 43% increased word count from AI Mode to AI Overview. And though really the count is 80 words and that may not seem like much, the 2 factors to remember are:

1. The word count variance changes from search to search. Some AI Mode searches can return pretty long responses
2. Search results have limited space and in the fight for search visibility, every pixel counts

2. Sources Slightly Different from AI Mode to AI Overview 

To continue further with comparing AI Overviews and AI Mode, one of the surprising differences is that not only are the actual responses not the same, but the sources cited aren’t always the same either.

 Below, I did the same search on AI Mode and AI Overview: 

You’ll see in the test search above, when looking for a social media agency, AI Mode automatically adjusts the responses to my local area in New York. 

And to be very clear, I did not prompt AI Mode to do this. If you look at my query, I’m just asking for top social media agencies. 

This happened frequently in all my searches with AI Mode. I was actually surprised how often it would return local results. It was to the point, where I had to continually ask AI mode that I was not interested in my local area, I wanted to see across the US. 

This is a huge strategic opportunity and really something that I think can give businesses a sigh of relief. It gives those businesses who don’t have the clout, history and/or resources to compete on the national scale, an opportunity to still appear on searches in the local area. And rather than having to hope a user wants to search their local area, Google’s AI Mode, tends to automatically make that assumption for you. 

Big win for the local businesses and local seo! 

4. The Key to Appearing Seems to be Directory Review Sites

I focused most of my searches with bottom of the funnel searches. Specifically focused on searches like “I’m looking for this service or business”. Below is an example of one of those searches:

What I found across most of these searches, is that what dictates if a business is going to show up is not it’s own SEO prowess. 

In these cases, ranking looks completely dictated by a business’s visibility and ranking in directory review sites. 

For this search, the major sources are Clutch and DesignRush, which Google AI Mode says a couple times in its response. 

What isn’t entirely clear just yet, is why certain vendors are chosen in AI Mode. My initial hypothesis is that the frequency at which each vendor is cited across these listing sites may be a reason why certain companies are chosen to be listed. Because of many of these sources, the 1st or 2nd ranked vendor in their respective list did not make the AI Mode response. 

From a strategy perspective, this does vault directory review sites again, as right from the outset they look to be the price of admission to even be considered for appearing for bottom of funnel service or vendor searches. 

And a final note, for those services or searches that may not have had directory review sites, the AI mode would then default to traditional search results and who had the best SEO. These searches were few and far between because many industries do have review sites. 

5. Keyword Specific Targeting Still Makes an Impact 

Most SEO literature you read today will invariably say the impact of keywords has severely dropped and the focus of SEO today is about topical authority, optimizing for Semantic SEO and really optimizing for a topic as a whole, not just a keyword. 

This is pretty much true and something that I agree with, but most SEO’s will also tell you that sometimes granular keyword optimization or placement still can be a solid tactic. And this seems to still be the case for AI Mode.

The above is a search I did on behalf of a friend and past client’s SEO. At the top you can see that I did a query for how to ship to Kenya and like I wrote above in section 3, AI Mode defaulted the search to shipping from Brooklyn to Kenya.

Then I asked AI Mode, what if I want to ship from California:

Interestingly enough you can see that the top source has in it’s page title: “Ship from California to Kenya” 

I was curious to see if this was truly just a random coincidence by looking at all the competitor sites, did they have a page in their sites that titled “California to Kenya” or any similar variation. And the answer was no, only Kentex Cargo had a page dedicated to California to Kenya

So in this case, it does show that even in AI Mode, there is still impact to having the right keywords optimized for the the right unique pages and it giving a site an increased chance at showing up in search results. 

A Lot to Still Sift Through

Overall, there is still so much to look through. AI Mode at the time of writing this post is less than a week old, however, I wanted to share initial findings to share the learnings as I go. 

Because this is AI, there is always a question about whether or not people (in this case myself) think that AI Search will destroy traffic to sites as we know it. I don’t think so and I am encouraged by what I saw by AI Mode. 

I do think the responses, though they do try to be thorough, still aren’t enough for any user to make a complete purchasing decision. The results do encourage use of going to sources and continuing searches to learn more about certain products or companies. 

Overall though, I still do anticipate lots of changes and what I may have written in this post could be defunct after an update, however I’ll continue to write and share as we figure out more and more!