What Is AI Mode? – Moz

So key points, as I say, it’s a tab like News and like those other things. 

Unlike News and like those other things, it doesn’t get broken out unfortunately in Google Search Console. It’s just lumped in with regular search. You can filter out News, you can filter out Image search in Search Console. You can’t filter out this. 

It has this ChatGPT-like format. So I mean that it’s longer form, but I also mean that you can have a conversation. You can continue in a chat box at the bottom, and it can produce different types and different medium of responses. So you can ask it to write you a poem. You can ask it to give you a code snippet. You can’t do that in regular Google search. You can do that here. So it’s kind of a ChatGPT competitor. 

It’s got this thing called the query fan-out. So you’ll be hearing this term a lot, I suspect. What this means is that when you search for something, “search” might be an interesting word, when you search for something in AI Mode, and Google have released a patent about this, it shows you that it’s doing a bunch of related searches, maybe dozens of related searches, and then it brings together all of the results from all of these different searches. It’s basically cutting out the middleman of the multistep process that you might historically have taken with research searching. 

And then it has these citations. Like I mentioned, I suspect these are not going to drive many clicks, but maybe we’ll be wrong.