Search Google for something moderately complicated and, some of the time, the results page opens with an AI-written summary before the blue links begin. Near the same search bar sits an option labelled “AI Mode”. Tap it, and the whole page turns into a conversation you can keep going.

The first is an AI Overview; the second is AI Mode. In both cases it’s Google’s AI answering you, so people tend to use the names interchangeably. But they show up in different ways, answer in different shapes and ask different things of the person using them, which means brands are competing for a different position in each.

Google decides when an AI Overview appears; people walk into AI Mode themselves

AI Overviews live inside ordinary search results. You search as usual, and if Google judges that generative AI will help, a summary appears above the results; otherwise you get the usual list of links. Google’s Search Central documentation for site owners says AI Overviews are shown only when its systems determine they add something to classic Search, and so they often don’t trigger. Users can’t switch them off, either. Google Search Help lists them alongside knowledge panels as a core Search feature, and the only way to get links alone is to pick the “Web” filter after searching.

AI Mode is somewhere you go on purpose. Google’s help page lists three ways in: go to google.com/ai, type a question on the Google homepage and tap “AI Mode”, or tap its icon on the Google app’s home screen. Inside, there’s an “Ask anything” bar near the bottom of the screen where you can type, speak, or upload photos and PDFs, and then keep asking questions that build on the previous answer.

AI Overviews came first, by a distance. Google launched them in the US in May 2024, and in May 2025 said they had reached more than 200 countries and territories and over 40 languages, with Chinese among the new additions. AI Mode opened for testing in Search Labs in early 2025, launched in the US that May, and arrived in Taiwan in Traditional Chinese on 8 October 2025. Neither is small now. In a post first published in June 2026 and updated at the end of August, Google put AI Overviews at more than 2.5 billion monthly active users and AI Mode at over a billion monthly users.

The different doors bring different people through them. Someone who sees an AI Overview may have no interest in talking to an AI at all; they just searched for something Google decided was worth summarising. Someone who opens AI Mode has chosen to have that conversation, and they bring longer questions with them. Google’s Taiwan launch announcement noted that early testers’ queries were almost three times the length of traditional searches.

An overview hands you a summary; AI Mode hands you a conversation

An AI Overview has a fixed shape: a few AI-written key points, with supporting links beside the text or within it. Google describes it as a way to get the gist of a complicated question faster, and a jumping-off point for the links. The overview itself doesn’t talk back. Once people have read it they either click through or rephrase the search, and if they want to keep asking, they have to go into AI Mode.

AI Mode is built for questions a single search can’t settle. Search Central says it’s particularly helpful where further exploration, reasoning or complex comparisons are needed. Google’s Taiwan announcement used the example of comparing two well-known hiking routes near Taipei on difficulty, transport and scenery, then recommending one for a beginner’s weekend day hike. Answers to that kind of question run long. They’re broken into sections, they compare, they recommend, and they finish with the web pages they drew on. When Google isn’t confident enough in a response, it shows a set of web results instead.

There’s a technical term underneath that you’ll keep running into. Google says AI Mode uses “query fan-out”: it breaks your question into subtopics, fires off a large batch of searches on your behalf, and writes up what it finds as a single response. Search Central adds that AI Overviews and AI Mode may both use the technique, which is why the links attached to a response can be wider-ranging and more varied than a classic page of web results.

The most useful line for telling the two apart is in that same document. AI Mode and AI Overviews may use different models and techniques, so the responses and links they show will vary. For the same question, being mentioned in the overview doesn’t mean AI Mode mentions you, and the reverse holds too.

One follow-up from an overview puts people in AI Mode

Still, the two aren’t parallel tracks. Since January 2026, someone reading an AI Overview on a phone can tap “Show more” at the bottom, ask the next question, and find themselves in AI Mode with their original search carried over. Google says the feature is global, and AI Overviews and AI Mode are both available in Taiwan, so the path should already work on phones there.

Say a customer searches for something in your category, sees your name in the overview, and follows up with “which of these is better value?” With that one question, they’re in AI Mode. The original search comes along, but the response is generated from a new query, and there’s no guarantee the way the overview described you survives the trip.

Listed, written in, still there each turn: three positions, three tests

In the blue-link era, a brand competed to be listed. Rank mattered, but even at number five people read your title and clicked through on their own, and once they arrived, your page did the talking.

AI Overviews turn that into being written into the paragraph. What people read is the handful of sentences the AI put together for them, and the system writing it decides whether you’re in it and how you’re described. Even “what position am I in” has changed meaning. Google Search Console’s documentation says an AI Overview occupies a single position in the results, and every link inside it is assigned that same position.

AI Mode goes a step further. The test is whether you’re still there by the third or fifth question. The questions are longer, they compare, they follow up, and according to Google’s Taiwan announcement, AI Mode draws on the Knowledge Graph and shopping data covering billions of products as well as on web pages. Among the fundamentals Search Central lists for these AI features is keeping your Merchant Center and Business Profile information up to date. So in AI Mode you’re represented by your website and also by the handful of records you’ve left across Google, and every one of them needs to describe the same company.

Google’s official position is that appearing in AI Overviews or AI Mode involves no additional requirements and no special optimisation: a page that’s indexed and eligible to show with a snippet already qualifies. That’s accurate, and Google’s Taiwan announcement also says AI Mode is rooted in its core quality and ranking systems, so SEO fundamentals still count here. But the statement is about eligibility. Once you’re in, who gets picked for the answer, how they’re described and whether they survive the follow-up also turn on the subtopics fan-out generates, on models that may differ between the two features, and on a response that’s regenerated with every follow-up. Ranking is one input among several.

So these three positions need looking after separately. If you only work the way you’d work for rankings, you’re covering the first. AI Overviews and AI Mode each need their own attention and their own work.

Reports count the two together and cut conversations into pieces

Go back to Search Console, and the way it measures these two things isn’t quite what most people expect.

To begin with, both are mixed in with ordinary search: sites appearing in AI Overviews and AI Mode are counted in the overall numbers under the Performance report’s “Web” search type, and even the Generative AI performance report that opened at the end of August 2026 still counts AI Overviews and AI Mode together.

Then there’s how AI Mode follow-ups are counted. The documentation’s rule is that a follow-up question in AI Mode is essentially a new query, and all impression, position and click data in the new response is attributed to that new query. A five-question conversation shows up in your reports as five unrelated queries. You can’t see which question followed which, let alone at which question a customer’s answer stopped including you.

Put together, the reports can tell you that you appeared. Which of the two you appeared in, and whether you were still there after the follow-up, they can’t say.

You never see the subtopics fan-out creates

Fan-out causes a very practical problem too. Neither the user nor you can see which subtopics Google split a question into, or which page each subtopic pulled; none of the reports above record it. When a customer asks “who’s better value?”, you won’t know whether AI Mode drew on your pricing page, your service overview or a blog post from three years ago. So the obvious fix, improving that one page, isn’t available.

However many subtopics a question can be split into, that’s how many of your pages have to hold up when they’re lifted out and read on their own, along with the Business Profile and product data Google also uses, all of it describing the same company. Even once all of that is aligned, the reports still blend the two surfaces and break conversations into fragments, so it’s hard to trace which surface, and which turn, started to include you.

Managed GEO connects both ends at once. On one end is the site itself: we take the whole site through the twelve dimensions of the GEO audit, so that each page reads clearly and says the right thing when it’s lifted out on its own. On the other end are the press coverage, reviews and third-party mentions outside your site that AI also uses as material, brought into line with what your site says. We measure results in two layers: GEO health for the site, and on the AI side, the same set of questions put to the major AI engines on a regular schedule, tracking first-recommendation rate, recommendation rate, mention rate, answer accuracy, sentiment and message alignment.

In a demo, we take a question your customers often ask about your category and open ordinary Google Search and AI Mode side by side: whether an overview appears and what it says about you, and where AI Mode places you in its answer.

Further reading