Google AI Mode and AI Overviews: what they mean for your website

A Google search used to mean ten blue links. Now, for many questions, the first thing you see is an answer written by AI, with a few sources beside it. For a small business that changes two things: who gets the click, and how you tell whether your website still brings in customers. Here is what we know for certain, from Google's documentation and published studies, and what to do about it.

What AI Overviews and AI Mode are

AI Overviews are the summaries shown above the regular results. They don't appear on every search: Google says it shows them only when its systems judge that they add something beyond classic results. Each summary links to the pages it drew on.

AI Mode is a separate search mode, chosen from the Google search bar, built for complex questions, comparisons and follow-ups. Its answers are longer, again with links to sources. It launched for everyone in the US in May 2025 and now runs in more than 200 countries and territories and over 35 languages.

How they choose sources

Both features start from Google's regular index. Google's documentation says they may run several related searches across subtopics at once (query fan-out) and build the answer from the pages they find. That's why a page can be cited even when it doesn't rank first for the exact search: it only needs to answer one of the sub-questions well.

There is one technical condition: the page must be indexed and eligible to appear in Google with a snippet. Google says plainly that there are no additional requirements, no special optimisations, no new AI text files and no dedicated schema.org markup.

What happens to your traffic

When a summary appears, people click results less often. Two published figures:

• Pew Research tracked 900 US adults in March 2025. They clicked a regular result in 8% of visits with an AI summary and 15% of visits without one. They clicked a link inside the summary in only 1% of visits.
• Ahrefs compared 300,000 keywords and found, in April 2025, a 34.5% lower click-through rate for the top result when an AI Overview appeared. That's a correlation, not a direct measurement.

For a local business, the drop mostly hits informational content ("how much does…", "what should… include"). Searches with clear intent ("auto repair near me", "emergency dentist Austin") still lead to the map, the Business Profile and the website.

How to get cited

The same things that work in regular search, with a few in front:

1. The direct answer at the top of the page. Two or three sentences that answer the question can be lifted as they are.
2. One page per service, with indicative prices, the area you serve and what's included. An AI answer to "how much does X cost in Denver" needs numbers.
3. Consistent business details everywhere: name, address, hours and phone, the same on your site and your Google Business Profile.
4. Reviews and mentions on other sites. AI answers look for confirmation from several sources, and Google reviews come first.
5. Indexed, fast pages. If a page isn't in Google, it isn't in Google's AI answers either. How to check is in why your website isn't showing up on Google.
6. Structured data that matches the visible text, never instead of it. What a local business needs is in our schema markup guide.

What doesn't help: special AI files (Google says they aren't needed, see llms.txt), text written for robots, or hundreds of near-identical pages. The wider guide to appearing in ChatGPT and Google's AI is how to show up in AI answers.

What Search Console shows

Clicks and impressions from AI Overviews and AI Mode are counted in the regular Performance report under the Web search type, mixed in with everything else. You can't separate them there.

On 3 June 2026, Google announced a separate report for generative AI features, and since 31 August 2026 every site has it. What it shows and what it doesn't:

Sites with very few AI impressions may not see the report yet. For visitors who come from ChatGPT, Gemini or Copilot without going through Google, you need Google Analytics; how to separate them is in how to track AI traffic in GA4.

Can you opt out of AI Overviews?

Yes. Also since June 2026, Search Console has a Search generative AI setting with two choices: include (the default) or exclude. Google started with the UK and extended it to all sites by 31 August 2026. If you exclude your site, its pages no longer appear in, or help ground, AI Overviews, AI Mode and AI summaries in Discover.

Google says excluding isn't used as a negative signal for regular results. But you lose the impressions from AI answers, and competitors who stay in get cited in your place. For a business that wants customers rather than readers, it's rarely worth it.

The older page-level controls still apply: nosnippet, data-nosnippet and max-snippet limit what text Google shows from a page, including in AI features. Google-Extended, the robots.txt token for Gemini model training, changes nothing in Search.

What to do this month

1. Open Search Console and look at the generative AI report: which pages appear, on which devices.
2. Compare them with the pages that bring enquiries or bookings. If the pages that sell don't appear at all, start there.
3. Put a short answer at the top of every service page and add indicative prices where you can.
4. Check that your business details match on the site, your Business Profile and directories.
5. Leave the Search generative AI setting on include unless you have a clear reason to change it.

The websites we build start from the same list: one page per service, the answer first, structured data, and speed and indexing checked at launch. Details are on our web design page.