Save your time reading this whole article. AI Search is now the norm.
I mean, look at this! Google “Search” is now a secondary button. “AI Mode” is the first click. This is what we’ve been able to find on each browser when starting a new session, even in incognito or private windows.
For 25 years, a Google search returned a ranked list of links and we picked one. Google added more and more rich result features, leading to an era of zero clicks for searches. In digital marketing, we call this list the “SERPs” (search engine results pages).
That default ended in May 2026.
This has been rolling out since early 2025:
Liz Reid, VP of Search at Google, stated that “Google Search is AI search through and through.” That’s a pretty bold a*s statement!
And there you have it, Search is AI now.
The Search segment is worth the 15 minutes to keep up to date on the shift: Google I/O ’26 Search Keynote
Search Engine Watch was able to find the Homepage version that Google’s been testing. It looks a lot like what you’d see for an AI LLM like Gemini rather than the traditional search-focused Homepage we’ve seen for the last couple of decades from Google.
The SERPs with blue links and metadata still exist. Reid said so from the stage, and Google’s own announcement describes blending web and AI results, not replacing one with the other. There’s a “Web” tab, and organic results still appear alongside AI responses. What changed is the default, and that default matters.
The majority of users don’t typically change their default viewing because it’s either an inconvenience or they don’t notice. So you’re going to see a huge shift in how users actually search on Google using AI.
It’s crazy to think about since AI Mode and Google’s AI Overviews have been seen as untrustworthy in responses and it comes up with garbage a lot of the time, but people are now relying on AI instead of traditional search results.
The two areas are also no longer separate. AI Overviews and AI Mode were merged into one continuous flow within Google Search, so a follow-up question on an Overview slides into a full AI Mode conversation without the user choosing anything.
Search used to take a lot more thought processing. Start with a query, get a list, then click to a website you think is your best option.
Now it’s a conversation.
Someone opens with a question or a request. The AI answers and typically suggests the next question. They go deeper. They compare options. They narrow it down. By the time they’re ready to buy or convert, they’ve done their entire education and consideration phase without landing on a single website.
Google, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude all propose follow-up prompts. The platform isn’t just answering what people ask. It’s shaping what they think to ask next. That’s a level of influence over the buyer journey that no channel has ever had.
And every one of those answers is personalized to the individual asking.
If you run paid search, you’ve probably noticed the same thing we have: ads show up far less often in AI Mode than on a classic results page. Yeah, ads only appear in roughly 25.5% of AI results.
Third-party tracking earlier this year put ads on roughly a quarter of AI Mode responses, meaning most AI Mode answers currently carry no ad at all.
This is the current state of ads. We all know that Google likes to make its money, so it’s probably going to start adding in more ads very quickly.
At Google Marketing Live on May 20, 2026, Google announced a new generation of Gemini-powered ad formats built specifically for AI Mode. The important detail is where they sit. The ads are designed to appear inside chats:
Three things follow from this for anyone managing spend.
Impressions are being rebuilt, not removed. The inventory is moving from above the answer to inside the answer. Volume looks low today because the formats are still in testing, largely US-first.
Eligibility runs through automation. Access to these placements is tied to Performance Max and AI Max campaign types. If your account is still built entirely on manual keyword campaigns, you’re not part of this.
Your organic and paid work now have the same problem. Both now depend on the same inputs: clear, specific, well-structured information that Google’s AI LLM Gemini can read and reuse. Feed quality, product data, and page content feed the ad system and the citation system at the same time. A digital marketing agency that runs those as two disconnected departments is going to underperform in one of these areas.
“Personal Response Optimization.”
The old model optimized for keywords: broad, short-tail, long-tail. The new model optimizes for the person and the conversation they’re actually having. That means going deeper than demographics into psychographics: what your ideal customer cares about, how they phrase problems, what they’re worried about, and what they’d ask an AI at each stage.
It also means your website plays a bit of a different role. Your site is not just a brochure people browse. It’s a library that AI reads, pulling specifics on services, process, and pricing to decide whether you’re worth citing.
Even Google uses “personalize” as part of its own practice in AI Mode when trying to find relevant results for an adequate response.
This shift isn’t a big surprise to us. We’ve been saying for years that AI would become everyone’s personal assistant. It wants to deliver the best results to its user, that’s its mission. Google has always said that it wants to deliver the best results to users, which now means AI as an assistant to get you there.
Be ready for this new shift. You’re going to start seeing a huge decrease in clicks to your site, an upturn in impressions (if you’re doing things right) and you’ll see competitors you’ve never had on your radar pop up ahead of you.
This new age of AI Search is going to solidify one thing: You can’t be everything to everyone, so make your brand’s stance on who you want to target as your customer group(s). Personalization on your online assets is going to be the most important play you make in 2026 and the future.
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