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Google Data: How People are using AI Mode in Google Search
Posted by on May 24, 2026 at 3:58 pmThank you u/aleydas who share this post in LinkedIn:
📊 Google just shared a new report on how people are using AI Mode in the US. 👇
Useful directional insights, yes. Complete market picture, no: The keyword data comes from sampled Google Trends data for AI Mode.
With that in mind, a few patterns worth paying attention to:
🔎 Searches are longer and more conversational.
The average AI Mode query is 3x the length of a traditional Search query. Keyword research now needs to be complemented with prompt, task, constraint and scenario research.
💬 Follow-up behavior matters.
Follow-up queries grew 40%+ on average per month. Brand visibility can't be analyzed only at the first prompt anymore: a brand might be mentioned, dropped, compared, misrepresented or never cited across the journey.
This means the unit of analysis is the journey, not the query.
🛍️ AI Mode is being used to decide, not only to discover.
* Which" queries grew 40% faster than AI Mode queries overall in the past six months.
* The top retail attributes people look for: price, location, color, brand, availability, size, material, style, type, quality.
This means Ecommerce AI Search optimization shouldn't be only about "more product content": it's accurate, complete, fresh and consistent product data across pages, structured data, feeds, variants, reviews and attributes.
📍 Local and availability intent is very visible.
Follow-up store queries include "near me", "in stock", "replacement parts", "car dealerships with financing".
AI systems need to understand location, inventory, services and constraints to satisfy these.
🧭 AI Mode is becoming a task layer, not only an answer layer.
Planning queries grew 80% faster than AI Mode queries overall. The opportunity is to be included in plans, shortlists, comparisons and workflows, not only ranked for individual queries.
👀 My takeaway:
Don't confuse Google's usage narrative with independent performance data. There's a behavioral shift and Google has every incentive to frame it favorably for its own ecosystem.
For SEOs and marketers, the practical next step isn't to replace SEO fundamentals. It's to expand how we research, optimize and measure:
✅ From keywords to prompts, tasks and constraints
✅ From rankings to presence, citations and representation accuracy
✅ From single queries to follow-up journeys
✅ From content-only optimization to entity, product, local and feed-level readiness
✅ From observed traffic to a more nuanced view of visibility and influenceAI Mode makes it increasingly risky to measure search visibility only through traditional rankings and clicks.
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1 Reply
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Honestly I believe part of the shift is because we have no choice but using it. It’s literally just thrown in there and most people have become too lazy to scroll down to the actual websites. That’s also why we’ve always seen the huge dropoff in CTR for any page that ranks below first position.
If you’d have put “ai mode” simply in a separate tab in Google I don’t think the “adoption” would be as much. On top of that I feel like the top ranking pages have become less relevant or helpful when an AI overview is shown. That forces you even more to use it, instead of Google facilitating your own research into a certain topic.
The problem I’m personally having with it, is that when I want to do conversational research, I’ll just go and use Gemini, Claude or whatever. When I want to actually research stuff on the web I’ll use the search engine. I don’t want the AI overview crap in there. But that’s probably just my personal take.
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