Google AI Mode and your website traffic in 2026

AI Mode is Google's conversational search tab: ask a question and it replies with an AI-written answer and links. It began in the US in 2025, reached the Middle East in English in August 2025 and added Modern Standard Arabic in October 2025, when it expanded to more than 200 countries and territories. Growth in 2026 has been fast. At its I/O conference in May, Google said AI Mode had more than a billion monthly users and AI Overviews more than 2.5 billion, and in July it described the two as merged into a single search experience.

The 2026 timeline

• January: Gemini 3 became the default model behind AI Overviews worldwide, and people could ask a follow-up from an AI Overview and carry on in AI Mode.
• March: Search Live, for searching by talking and pointing the camera, became available wherever AI Mode is.
• April: Personal Intelligence, which lets AI Mode use a person's Gmail and Photos with their permission, launched across the Arab world, first for Google AI subscribers.
• May: a redesigned search box that accepts images, files and video, and Gemini 3.5 Flash as AI Mode's default model. Agents that book local services and call businesses on someone's behalf launched in the US only.
• August: some AI Overviews began opening fully expanded, pushing ordinary results further down the page. Google says this happens only where its systems judge it most useful.

What has not changed

Google says AI Mode is not the default search experience anywhere. In June, a Google vice president called a test build of Chrome that sent searches to AI Mode an error, and said there were no plans to make it the default. Google has published no AI Mode or AI Overviews figures for the UAE or Saudi Arabia, and its announcements refer to Modern Standard Arabic, not Gulf dialects.

How your site shows up in AI answers

In May 2026, Google changed how links appear in AI answers: more links placed beside the sentence they support, previews on desktop hover showing the site name and page title, labels on links from a person's news subscriptions, and suggested links to related angles. Later that month, Preferred Sources, which lets people choose sites they want to see more of, came to AI Overviews and AI Mode, along with a label for articles other publications often cite. Google says people are twice as likely to click a source they have chosen.

The argument over clicks

Google's position is that total organic clicks are relatively stable and that clicks from AI results are of higher quality. In July, Sundar Pichai said AI features send billions of clicks to websites every week. Google has not published the data behind those statements. Independent research points the other way:

• Pew Research, March 2025: people clicked an ordinary result 8 percent of the time when an AI summary appeared, against 15 percent without one.
• Ahrefs, using December 2025 data: the top result's click-through rate was 58 percent lower when an AI Overview appeared.
• Seer Interactive, early 2026: organic click-through alongside an AI Overview fell sharply through 2025 and partly recovered, and brands cited in the Overview got about 120 percent more clicks than those not cited on the same search.
• SparkToro, with Similarweb data for the US from January to April 2026: 68 percent of Google searches ended without a click, and AI Mode handled only 0.34 percent of searches.

None of this contradicts Google's billion monthly AI Mode users, since one figure counts monthly users worldwide and the other a share of US searches. The common thread is direction: fewer clicks per search, particularly for questions an AI answer can settle on its own.

New controls in Search Console

• Generative AI performance reports show impressions in AI Overviews, AI Mode and AI features in Discover, by page, country and date, with data from 18 May 2026. They count impressions only, not clicks, and reached every site worldwide on 31 August. Clicks from AI features are still counted in the ordinary Performance report.
• A new setting lets a site keep its content out of AI Overviews, AI Mode and AI in Discover while staying in ordinary results. Google says it is not a ranking signal. It began in the UK, where the competition regulator required it, and went worldwide on 31 August.
• Since August, sites can add a button inviting readers to make them a preferred source.

What to do with your own site

• Open the new AI impressions report for your site and compare it with clicks on the same pages in the Performance report.
• Think hard before using the opt-out. It keeps your content out of AI answers, which is where searching increasingly happens.
• Put effort into content an AI answer cannot replace: first-hand experience, original data, local detail and useful tools.
• Ask loyal readers and customers to add your site as a preferred source.
• Judge your website, and any agency reporting on it, by visibility and conversions as well as clicks, since clicks per search are falling.

If you would like to understand what AI search is doing to your own traffic, or plan pages that keep their value when the answer arrives before the link, talk to ALXO. We are happy to look at the numbers with you.