AI Mode is Google’s most powerful AI search experience, providing answers to complex questions in a way that anticipates the user’s information needs. Although Google says that nothing special needs to be done to rank in AI Mode, the reality is that SEO only makes pages eligible to appear.

The following facts, insights, and examples demystify AI Mode and offer a clear perspective on how pages are ranked and why.

What Is AI Mode?

Google’s AI Mode was introduced on March 5, 2025, as an experiment in Google Labs, then swiftly rolled out as a live Google search surface on May 20. AI Mode is described as its most cutting-edge search experience, combining advanced reasoning with multimodality. Multimodality means content beyond text data, such as images and video content.

AI Mode is a significant evolution of Google Search that encourages users to research topics. This presents benefits and changes to how search works:

  • The benefit is that Google is citing a greater variety of websites per query.
  • The change is that websites are being cited for multiple queries, beginning with the initial query plus follow-up queries.

Those two factors present challenges to SEO. For example, do you optimize for the initial query, or what can be considered a more granular follow-up query? Most SEOs may consider optimizing for both.

Query Fan-Out

Similar to AI Overviews, AI Mode uses what they call a query fan-out technique, which divides the initial search query into subtopics that anticipate further information the user may need.

Query fan-out anticipates the user’s information journey. So, if they ask question A, Google’s AI Mode will show answers to follow-up questions about B, C, and D.

For example, if you ask, “What is a mechanical keyboard?” Google answers the following questions:

  1. What is a mechanical keyboard?
  2. What are mechanical switches?
  3. What happens when a key is pressed on a mechanical keyboard?
  4. What are keycaps and what materials are they made from?
  5. What is the role of the printed circuit board (PCB)?
  6. How are mechanical switches categorized?

The following screenshot of the AI Mode search result shows the questions (in red) positioned next to the answers, illustrating how query fan-out generates related questions and creates answers for them.

Screenshot of query fan-out in AI Mode, September 2025

How I Extracted Latent Questions From AI Mode Search Results

The way I extracted the questions that query fan-out is answering was by doing an inverse knowledge search, also known as reverse QA.

I copied the output from AI Mode into a document, then uploaded it to ChatGPT with the following prompt:

Read the document and extract a list of questions that are directly and completely answered by full sentences in the text. Only include questions if the document contains a full sentence that clearly answers it. Do not include any questions that are answered only partially, implicitly, or by inference.

Try that with AI Mode to get a better…


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Last Update: October 6, 2025