Google Now Answers for You, and AI Mode Could Be Quietly Eating Your Website's Clicks

What AI Mode is, and why it suddenly matters

AI Mode is a tab in Google Search that skips the classic list of blue links. Instead, you get a written answer generated by AI, with a handful of supporting links on the side. You can ask long questions and follow up, much like a conversation.

Google has been rolling it out country by country and language by language. In Brazil, where our agency is based, it launched in Portuguese in September 2025, and interest has kept climbing: Semrush shows roughly 27,000 monthly searches for "modo ia google" there alone.

Then there are AI Overviews, the AI summary shown at the top of a regular search. Both follow the same idea: answer the question before the person needs to visit a website.

What happens to clicks when the AI answers first

This is where it gets uncomfortable. Pew Research Center tracked the real Google activity of 900 U.S. adults and published the results in July 2025. The findings were blunt:

Put simply, when an AI summary shows up, the chance of someone clicking through to a website drops by nearly half. Clicking the sources the AI lists is rare. Pew also found that 26% of searches with an AI summary ended the browsing session right there, compared with 16% of searches without one.

To be fair, this study looked at AI summaries in the U.S., not AI Mode specifically, and Google says the overall volume of clicks it sends to the web has stayed relatively stable. Still, the direction is hard to ignore if your practice or business depends on being found on Google.

One more thing worth knowing: Google counts traffic from these AI features together with the rest of your search traffic in Search Console. If your visits have dipped and you cannot explain why, this could be part of it, and there is no separate line that will flag it for you.

How to become the source the AI cites

Here is the good news: there is no secret trick, which works in your favor if you get the fundamentals right. Google's own documentation says that for a page to appear as a supporting link in AI Mode or AI Overviews, it must be indexed and eligible to show in Search with a snippet. There are no extra technical requirements. In other words, it is SEO, taken more seriously.

What we recommend in practice:

• Answer real questions. The AI builds its answer from clear, quotable passages. Pages that plainly explain what a treatment or service costs, how it works and who it is for stand a better chance of being used.
• Make it obvious who you are. Address, specialty, who you treat or serve, how long you have been doing it. Consistent, concrete details across your website and your Google Business Profile help the AI trust you.
• Keep your Google profile current. For local searches, reviews, opening hours and photos still carry a lot of weight.
• Do not rely on one channel. With organic clicks harder to win, running Google Ads for high-intent searches from people ready to book makes more sense than ever.

At IKOEH, our SEO work now covers exactly this: making your website clear enough to be picked as a source, and keeping an eye on whether AI is changing your traffic. If your site has felt quieter lately, let's talk.