AI Mode is Live: What It Means for Your Visibility & Search Console Data
Google has officially rolled out its “AI Mode” to all U.S. searchers, providing a deeper, more conversational AI experience directly in search results.
What is AIO Mode: AI Mode is a new feature in Google Search that provides AI-powered, conversational responses to complex search queries. Think of it as having a conversation with Google’s AI to delve deeper into a subject. Google said AI Mode “is particularly helpful for queries where further exploration, reasoning, or comparisons are needed.”
This is a significant shift in the search landscape. AI Mode supports searching with text, voice, and images and offers conversational follow-up questions similar to Gemini. Google Search Console will now include data from AI Mode. Here’s how metrics will be reported according to Google’s help doc.
AI Mode Metrics in Google Search Console:
- Clicks: Any click on an external link from the AI Mode interface registers as a click in Google Search Console.
- Impressions: Your page earns an impression when it’s presented as part of an AI response.
- Position: Rankings are determined using the same principles as standard search results. Unlike AI Overviews, individual elements within AI Mode (like link cards or image blocks) each receive their own distinct position based on regular search element rules.
Changing Perspective During the Great Decoupling
Have you noticed your Google Search Console (GSC) clicks declining and pulling away from impressions? If so, you might be a victim of “The Great Decoupling,” a term for this drop-off coined by X user, D@RWIN. This has become common with the rise of AI Overviews in Google Search, and, unfortunately, it seems like it will continue to be the new normal.
So, what do you do? Well, you can start by adding highly relevant, unique, and useful content to your site (think pillar pages and hub & spoke-style informational content) that answers questions your users may have and incorporates high-value keywords. We also recommend re-considering which KPIs are most important to your business. Knowing that impressions are often inflated and CTRs are smaller than ever, consider things like keyword visibility/share of voice, time on page, conversion rate/engagement rate, key events, and landing page traffic/revenue.
Google Cloud Outage: What You Need to Know
On Thursday, June 12th, Google Cloud experienced a significant outage lasting approximately three hours, which led to a cascade of issues across numerous Google services, including Google Search, Workspace apps, and others. In total, disruptions were observed across more than 50 distinct Google Cloud services spanning over 40 global regions.
Image source: ByteByteGo
Google apologized and released an incident report on Friday, June 13th that explains the downtime. Google wrote, “Google Cloud customers and their users trust their businesses to Google, and we will do better. We apologize for the impact this has had not only on our customers’ businesses and their users but also on the trust of our systems. We are committed to making improvements to help avoid outages like this moving forward.”
Google explicitly stated that the issue stemmed from a new feature not being properly tested in real-world scenarios and a lack of “feature flags” for a controlled rollout. Going forward, Google promises to audit all systems, improve communication during outages, and enhance architecture for better resilience.
AI Search Results Now Including Short-Form Video
For those in the know about social media trends, it comes as no surprise that short-form video (also known as ‘Shorts’) is a crucial part of any modern digital content strategy. It’s appealing to shorter attention spans and those with a preference for more visual content.
As AI search results gain prominence, they also continue to grow in complexity. Shorts are one of the latest integrations SEOs have noticed in both AI Overviews and Bing Copilot results. Both models are pulling in 60-second-or-less videos from sources like YouTube Shorts, TikTok posts, and Instagram Reels to supplement textual content.
What does this mean for businesses? Well, if you haven’t already ventured into the world of short-form video creation, it’s likely worth exploring. Dig into your audience insights to see if it makes sense to build Shorts into your digital marketing mix. You can also check out our advice for optimizing YouTube videos for SEO.
Google Updates AI-Related Documentation
From using AI-generated content to how you show up in AI features, Google added two new documents to help site owners better understand recent changes.
The first, Google Search’s guidance on using generative AI content on your website, explains that while using generative AI to research a topic or help organize original content is fine, using it to generate pages that add little value for users may violate Google’s spam policies. If you do use AI to create content or images, “focus on accuracy, quality, and relevance,” and use metadata to help Google and users understand it. It also says to provide context to users about why you used AI in creating the page.
In AI features and your website, Google describes how AI Overviews and AI Mode work to help people find answers to complicated queries and explore content they might not have before. Both AI features are now included in your overall search data in Search Console (see above), but they are not separated from other impressions and clicks, so there is no official way to tell which queries led to AI features.
The same document also explains that you can use robots.txt directives and controls on your site and on your pages, like nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet, or noindex, to limit what the AI models can use for training and grounding other systems.
While the document says there are “no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode,” our team’s research and experimentation tell a different story. Contact us to start a conversation about generative engine optimization (GEO).
Google also updated Managing multi-regional and multilingual sites by deleting a paragraph about using robots.txt to block search engines from crawling automatically translated pages on your site. It seems that Google has softened its stance on considering the translations as spammy since they’ve improved a lot with the newer AI models.
Add Loyalty Program Info Without Merchant Center
If your business has a loyalty or membership program, you can now define that on your site with structured data markup, even if you don’t have a Merchant Center account. Within Organization markup, add your program’s details and put the program’s benefits within Product markup. Doing this can help your program be more visible in search results.
ChatGPT Adds UTM Parameters
This will be helpful for tracking in GA4: OpenAI has added UTM parameters to the “More” section in ChatGPT. Previously, the parameters were only on the citations, but when the “More” section is available, they are also appended to those links. This update could increase the amount of traffic a website sees in GA4 from ChatGPT users.
