For twenty years, winning at Google meant one thing: get a blue link near the top of the page. That page is quietly disappearing. Google AI Mode, the conversational, Gemini-powered search experience that rolled out to over a billion users through the first half of 2026, does not hand back ten links for you to choose from. It reads the web, composes an answer, and cites a few sources inline. Either you are one of those citations or you are nowhere, and "nowhere" now includes plenty of queries you used to rank first for.
This is not the same thing as the AI Overview box that sits above normal results. AI Mode is a full replacement surface: the user asks a question in plain language, often a long and specific one, and gets a synthesised answer with follow-ups. There is no list to scroll. The uncomfortable part for anyone who has invested in SEO is that ranking #1 in classic results no longer guarantees you appear in the AI answer for the same query. Different mechanics, different winners.
The good news is that the work is not exotic, and most of it overlaps with SEO you should already be doing. Here is what actually gets you cited.
How AI Mode picks its sources
AI Mode does not read the whole web live for every query. It leans on Google's index, then uses a technique Google calls query fan-out: it silently breaks your question into several sub-queries, runs them, and assembles an answer from the pages that best satisfy each piece. So a single question like "best CRM for a small law firm in Portugal" becomes a fan of narrower searches (pricing, integrations, Portuguese support, reviews) and pulls a source for each.
Two consequences fall straight out of that. First, breadth of coverage matters more than a single keyword-stuffed page. A page that answers one facet completely gets pulled for that facet. Second, the model has to be able to extract a clean, quotable claim from your page without guessing. If a person has to interpret your layout to find the answer, the model probably will not bother.
Citations, not clicks, are the new scoreboard
Brand mentions now correlate with AI citation at roughly 0.71, versus about 0.22 for backlinks. That does not make links worthless, they still decide which publishers Google trusts enough to quote, but it means being talked about across the web now feeds directly into whether an AI answer names you. Track citations and referral traffic from AI surfaces, not just rank position.
Write answers a model can lift
The single highest-leverage change is structural. Models reward content they can extract cleanly, so give them extractable content.
Lead with the answer. Put a direct, one or two sentence answer immediately under each heading, then expand. Do not bury the conclusion three paragraphs down after the throat-clearing.
Turn headings into real questions. Who, what, how much, how long. The heading "How much does a custom CRM cost?" maps onto a fan-out sub-query far better than "Pricing considerations".
Use tables and lists for anything comparative. Models scrape structured formats to build comparisons. A clean pricing table or a numbered process is far more liftable than the same facts dissolved into prose.
State facts with specifics. Real numbers, dates, named tools and named places. "Around 350 to 10,000 euros" is quotable; "it depends on your needs" is not.
None of this is a trick. It is the same clarity that helps a human skim, which is exactly why Google's own May 2026 guidance was blunt that there is no separate "AEO" or "GEO" discipline. It is good SEO, applied to a reader that happens to be a model.
Be legible to machines, not just people
AI Mode still cares deeply about the plumbing. Two areas do most of the work here, and we have written full guides on both.
Structured data is how you remove the guesswork. Clean Organization, Article and Product markup tells the model what your page is and who stands behind it, and pages with solid schema are roughly 2.5 times more likely to surface in an AI answer. If you have not done this yet, start with our guide to schema that AI reads.
Speed and rendering decide whether you are even eligible. Pages that fail Core Web Vitals or hide their content behind client-side rendering are quietly passed over. Server-rendered, fast, crawlable pages get read; slow JavaScript-heavy ones often do not. For the App Router specifics, see our Next.js SEO playbook.
Then there is the newest lever: an llms.txt file and making sure your site is ready for AI browsers and agents, the AI clients that increasingly arrive to act, not just read.
Build authority the model can trust
Extractability gets you considered. Trust gets you chosen. AI Mode is conspicuously conservative about which sources it will put its name next to, and it leans on the same authority signals Google has always used, sharpened.
Topical depth beats one-off posts. A site with fifteen connected articles on AI search, cross-linked into a coherent cluster, reads as an authority on the subject in a way a single lonely page never will. This is the entire logic behind our generative engine optimization work: build the cluster, link it tightly, and let the whole thing vouch for each part. Named authors with real credentials, consistent Organization details everywhere, and mentions on sites the model already trusts all compound into "safe to cite".
What to actually measure
Rank tracking still has a place, but it is now a partial view. Watch three things instead:
SignalWhat it tells youWhere to see itAI referral trafficWhether AI surfaces send you clicksGA4, segmented by referrerCitation appearancesWhether you are named in answersManual checks and AI-visibility toolsBrand search volumeWhether mentions are compoundingSearch Console, branded queries
The shift underneath all of this is simple to say and uncomfortable to absorb: the goal moved from being clicked to being quoted. A page can now influence a buying decision without ever getting a visit, because the answer that shaped the decision cited your claim. Optimise for that. Write the clearest, most specific, best-structured answer on the topic, prove who you are with schema and authority, and make sure a machine can read every word of it. That is the whole game in 2026, and it happens to be the game that has always rewarded the sites worth reading.
