Google AI Mode in 2026: what it means for websites

Google AI Mode became a mainstream way to search in 2026. Google says it passed 1 billion monthly users in May. Google also published its own guide for website owners on how to appear in it. Here is what changed this year and what it means for your website.

What changed in Google AI Mode and AI Overviews this year

• 27 January: Gemini 3 became the default model for AI Overviews globally. People can ask a follow-up question from an AI Overview and continue in AI Mode.
• 26 March: Search Live, which lets people search by voice and camera, expanded to every language and location where AI Mode is available. That is more than 200 countries and territories.
• 19 May (Google I/O): AI Mode had passed 1 billion monthly users, one year after launch. Gemini 3.5 Flash became the default model in AI Mode. Google also announced booking for local experiences and services, and calls to businesses on a user’s behalf, starting in the US.
• 27 August: Hotel booking in AI Mode started rolling out in the US, in English. The hotel or booking site stays the merchant of record.
• 15 October: Google added more inline links to AI answers and began showing them higher up. It also started testing a section at the top of some answers for official web pages.
• 28 October: Ads in AI Mode expanded to ten more countries, including Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Australia, Canada and India.

Google also ran two core updates this year, in March and May, plus spam updates in March, June, August and September.

People ask AI Mode longer questions

AI Mode queries are, on average, three times longer than traditional searches. That figure comes from Google’s US data for May 2026.

Longer questions carry more detail: a budget, a location, a deadline, a problem to solve. Pages that answer those specific questions clearly have more chances to be used in an answer.

Google’s own guide to optimising for AI search

On 15 May, Google announced an official guide to its generative AI features. The main points:

• It is still SEO. Google’s AI features are rooted in its core Search ranking and quality systems. In Google’s view, “AEO” and “GEO” are still SEO.
• Your pages must be indexed. A page must be indexed and eligible to show with a snippet to appear in AI features.
• No special files are needed. Google Search does not use llms.txt or similar AI text files. There is no special schema.org markup for AI features.
• Mass-produced pages are a risk. Creating pages for every variation of a question, mainly to influence AI answers, breaks Google’s scaled content abuse policy.
• Original content matters most. Unique, useful, “non-commodity” content will likely matter more than any other suggestion in the guide.

For most businesses, this is useful clarity. The work that helps you rank in Google Search is the same work that helps you appear in AI answers. It is also why we plan SEO and AI search optimisation together.

You can now measure AI visibility in Search Console and Bing

Until this year, there was no official way to see how often your site appeared in AI answers. Now both Google and Microsoft report it.

• Google Search Console added Generative AI performance reports on 3 June. They have been available to all websites worldwide since 31 August. They show impressions in AI Overviews, AI Mode and AI features in Discover, by page, country, device and date.
• Bing Webmaster Tools added an AI Performance report in public preview on 10 February. It shows how often your pages are cited in Microsoft Copilot and Bing’s AI summaries, and which phrases led to those citations.

If you have not opened these reports yet, start there. They show which pages AI search already uses and which important pages are missing.

How to prepare your website for AI Mode

A few steps help across Google, Bing and AI assistants. None of them guarantees a mention, because AI answers change often.

• Make sure your key pages can be crawled and indexed. Everything else depends on it.
• Answer the detailed questions your customers ask. Write from your own experience, with prices, steps and examples where you can.
• Keep your business details accurate. For Google, that means your Business Profile if you are a local business, and Merchant Center if you sell online.
• Earn real mentions, not fake ones. Seeking inauthentic mentions across the web is not as helpful as it might seem.
• Review your AI crawler settings before 2027. Google plans to support a shared robots.txt signal for opting out of AI training in 2027. Microsoft will honour new training and grounding preferences from 1 February 2027. Microsoft warns that blocking grounding will reduce your brand’s visibility in its AI experiences.

Grounding means an AI tool using your pages to answer a question now, often with a link back to you. For most businesses, that is the setting to keep switched on.