AI Mode is the tab where Google stops handing you links and answers you directly, like a chat. Google is pushing more and more people into it, and there are no ten results there: there is one answer.
Free plan, no card required · Nine AI assistants
Out of every 100 answers, how many name your brand
Last 30 days, 10 questions asked every day
For twenty years the job was to be among the ten links. AI Mode removes that list: you ask and Google answers. If your brand is not inside the answer, there is no second chance further down.
The telling part is that Google has not simply launched it and left it there: it is using it as a funnel. AI Overviews appear on a growing share of searches and push people onward into the conversation. This is a change of product direction, not a side feature.
If your name is in that answer, you get the customer. If it is not, you never find out: there is no list of results to check your position in and usually no click either, so nothing shows up in your website statistics.
There is one signal in Google's own data that explains why this matters: searches are getting longer. Those running past five words went from 13.6 out of 100 to 16.1 in a single year.
People are carrying the habit of asking an AI back into search, typing whole sentences instead of two loose words. That changes what you have to measure: watching short keywords is no longer enough, you have to watch full questions, which is exactly what we do.
Out of every 100 Google searches, how many run past five words
May 2025 against May 2026, United States
Source: Similarweb, 2026 Generative AI Landscape. People increasingly type the way they talk, carrying the habit of asking an AI back into search.
If you had to take a single actionable fact away from AI Mode, this is it. A study measured how often each engine cites Reddit, and AI Mode is off the scale: it cites Reddit in 44 out of every 100 answers, and when the question is about opinions or comparisons, exactly the moment somebody is deciding what to buy, that rises to 71 out of 100.
Another figure points the same way: AI Mode is the engine where citations are most concentrated in a few domains, of all those measured. Together they mean the same thing: you do not win here with your own website, you win by being on the handful of sites the engine already trusts, and Reddit is top of that list.
Out of every 100 answers, how many cite Reddit
And on opinion and comparison questions, which is when people buy
Source: Reddit doesn't get cited (through the API), 2026. Measured on each engine's web interface.
We ask your 10 questions to AI Mode continuously and store every answer whole: whether it names you, where, in what tone, next to which competitors, which pages it read to build the answer and what it searched for first. You read the month, not the day.
The full method, with the research behind why it is measured this way and what can actually be changed, is in how we measure whether an AI names your brand. And there is nothing to install on your site.
Because these engines do not answer the same thing twice: only three to five out of every ten pages they use repeat from one query to the next. A single answer tells you almost nothing; how many days out of thirty you came up does. It is set out with the data in how we measure.
Yes. The free plan asks your questions to ChatGPT every day at no cost and with no card, so you can see how it works. The other engines come with the paid plans.
Every 72 hours rather than daily. AI Mode is one of the most expensive engines to query and checking it every day would push the plan price up without adding much. At that frequency the monthly trend comes out just as clearly.
From the Pro plan. The Lite and free plans do not include it, because of the cost of each query.
We ask your questions to AI Mode and the other assistants and keep the history, so you can see how many days you came up and who came up instead of you. Free plan, no card needed. Full detail on the pricing page.
Start tracking freeAlso check your brand in ChatGPT · Google AI Overviews · Perplexity · Gemini · Copilot · Claude · DeepSeek · Qwen.
