AI Mode: Features & Ranking — Whiteboard Friday

So the first thing I want to talk about is overlap with organic, which I think is pretty interesting.

So I'll link some resources below. But the way that AI Mode works is it makes these sort of fan-out queries, that's Google's language, and then basically searches for some related search terms and brings those back in.

The next thing I want to talk about is the idea of SERP features. So obviously, we're familiar with SERP features in regular organic. If I talk to you about things like images, local packs, video results, featured snippets, AI Overviews themselves, of course, you're familiar with these kinds of SERP features.

But AI Mode you can think of almost as a pure feature SERP. It has a lot of similar or even the same features, and we're parsing those as well.

So, this line chart, I've just picked out three features. I think we have more than 10, maybe a dozen features being tracked right now. This picks out just for three of them how common they are in different ranking positions as you move down. So this is position 1 on the AI Mode results, and this is position 10. We're only going down to Position 10 for the sake of this chart. This is Position 10 on the AI Mode results.

So you can see the first result is almost always, 90-something percent of the time, the first result is almost always a paragraph, that block of sort of verbose text. But then, as you come down, cards, which is the thing that resembles organic, cards sort of gradually build.

So normally, if there is something that resembles organic, it's right at the bottom of the AI Mode result. You have to scroll down quite far to find that thing that looks like organic. Whereas obviously, in regular SERPs, it's nowhere near as bad. You see organic in first place about half the time in our latest data.

So yes, there is often something that looks like organic. But no, it's still not quite as good as you would see, from our perspective as SEOs, as good as you might see the regular SERP as being.

The other result type I've included here is lists. I've just thrown that in because that's the third most common, and it sort of furthers that point that these are very text-heavy. A list is another text-heavy feature. These are very text-heavy results in general.

Anyway, I hope you found those data points interesting. There will be a lot more data to back this up, linked directly beneath. Thank you very much.