{"id":18717,"date":"2025-05-27T17:55:02","date_gmt":"2025-05-27T21:55:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ipullrank.com\/?p=18717"},"modified":"2025-08-13T15:30:31","modified_gmt":"2025-08-13T19:30:31","slug":"how-ai-mode-works","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ipullrank.com\/how-ai-mode-works","title":{"rendered":"How AI Mode Works and How SEO Can Prepare for the Future of Search"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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I attended the first day of Google I\/O 2025 and left feeling a mix of excitement and anxiety. On one hand, as a user and developer, I’m excited for the new products and features. Google is truly a marvel of modern technology and that was on full display with products like Flow, AndroidXR, and Search. On the other hand, I’m terrified at what it means for the SEO community because the skillset and technology we use to support driving visibility is not prepared for where things are headed. To top it off, the ongoing conversation is keeping people complacent which is dangerous for the advancement of the field.<\/span><\/p>

There’s been much chatter within the SEO community lately about how the generative AI driven features of Google make no difference; \u201cit’s just SEO.\u201d\u00a0 In fact, Google\u2019s <\/span>latest<\/span><\/a> attempts<\/span><\/a> at guidance reflect that. Much of the argument is rooted in the overlapping mechanics between generative information retrieval and classic information retrieval for the web.<\/span><\/p>

Yes, you still need to make content accessible, indexable, and understood, but the difference is that in classic IR, your content comes out the same way it goes in. In generative IR, your content is manipulated and you don\u2019t know how or if it will appear on the other side even if you did all your SEO best practices right and it informed the response. Therein lies the disconnect and the layer where SEO as it currently exists is not enough.<\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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The Overlaps with Classic Organic Search will be Short-Lived<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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Last month at <\/span>SEO Week<\/span><\/a>, in my Brave New World of SEO talk, I doubled down by saying that, sure, there is high overlap between the organic SERPs and AI Overviews <\/span>right now<\/span><\/i>, but we\u2019re not ready for what happens when memory, personalization, MCP,\u00a0 and the requisite agentic capabilities are mixed in. <\/span>What happens when Google is pulling data from every application on the web?<\/span><\/i><\/p>

With the announcement of enhancements to AI Mode, literally everything I said is either now live in your Google Search experience or on the way this year. Google has also been warning us since the launch of their <\/span>AIO and AI Mode explainer doc<\/span><\/a> that the best of AI Mode will ultimately make its way to the core search experience. The more I’ve researched how these features work, the more adamant I’ve become that our space needs to think bigger.<\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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So, let\u2019s talk about why we\u2019re not ready and what we need to do to get ready.<\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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It\u2019s Not<\/em> Just SEO, but what is SEO Anyway?<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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The argument that AI Mode and AI Overviews are \u201cjust SEO\u201d is short-sighted at best and dangerously misinformed at worst.<\/span><\/p>

What this position gets wrong isn\u2019t just technical nuance; it\u2019s the complete misunderstanding of how these generative surfaces fundamentally differ from the retrieval paradigm that SEO was built on. The underlying assumption is that everything you’d do to show up in AI Mode is already covered by SEO best practices. But if that were true, the industry would already be embedding content at the passage level, running semantic similarity calculations against query vectors, and optimizing for citation likelihood across latent synthetic queries. The shocking lack of mainstream SEO tools that do any of that is a direct reflection of the fact that most of the SEO space is not doing what is required. Instead, our space is doing what it has always done, and <\/span>sometimes<\/span><\/i> it’s working.<\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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SEO is a Discipline Without Boundaries\n<\/h3>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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Part of the confusion stems from the fact that SEO has no fixed perimeter. It has absorbed, borrowed, and repurposed concepts from disciplines like performance engineering, information architecture, UX, analytics, and content strategy, often at Google’s prompting.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Structured data? Now SEO. Site speed? SEO. Entity modeling? SEO. And the list goes on.<\/span><\/p>

In truth, if every team accounted for Google’s requirements in their own practice areas, SEO as a standalone discipline would not exist.<\/span><\/p>

So what we call SEO today is more of a reactive scaffolding. It\u2019s a temporary organizational response to Google’s structural influence on the web. And that scaffolding is now cracking under the weight of a fundamentally different paradigm: generative, reasoning-driven retrieval and the competition that has arisen on the back of it.<\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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SEO is Not Optimizing for AI Mode<\/h3>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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There is a profound disconnect between what\u2019s technically required to succeed in generative IR and what the SEO industry currently does. Most SEO software still operates on sparse retrieval models (TF-IDF, BM25) rather than dense retrieval models (vector embeddings). We don\u2019t have tools that parse and embed content passages. Our industry doesn\u2019t widely analyze or cluster candidate documents in vector space. We don\u2019t measure our content’s relevance across the synthetic query set that\u2019s never visible to us. We don\u2019t know how often we’re cited in these generative surfaces, how prominently, or what intent class triggered the citation. The major tools have recently begun sharing rankings data for AIOs, but miss out on the bulk of them because they track based on logged-out states.<\/span><\/p>

The only part that is \u201cjust SEO\u201d is the fact that whatever is being done is being done incorrectly.<\/span><\/p>

AI Mode introduces:<\/span><\/p>