Eight months of data on what the AI Mode rollout has meant
This post was published on the day Google launched AI Mode in the UK in July 2025. Since then, AI Mode has expanded globally and significant data has emerged on its impact on organic traffic, click behaviour, and publisher revenue. Here is what has actually happened.
By October 2025 Google had rolled out AI Mode to over 40 additional countries including Germany, Austria, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, and Sweden, adding 38 languages simultaneously. France was excluded due to ongoing regulatory discussions. AI Mode now operates in more than 200 countries and territories.
The traffic impact on UK businesses
Tank research published in October 2025 analysed 800 UK companies across 16 sectors, using Ahrefs traffic data across 4,800 data points covering three years. Average monthly organic traffic growth dropped from 26.3% to 3.7%, a collapse of 22.6 percentage points. The hospitality sector was hardest hit with a 6.7% decline in monthly organic traffic, compared to 47.9% growth the previous year. The IT sector was most resilient, maintaining 2.1% growth.
CTR impact confirmed across a larger dataset
Seer Interactive’s study of 3,119 informational queries across 42 organisations (June 2024 to September 2025) found organic CTR dropped 61% and paid CTR dropped 68% for queries where AI Overviews appear. Even queries without AI Overviews saw a 41% organic CTR decline, suggesting the broader shift to AI-first search behaviour is reducing clicks independently of AI Overview presence.
The upside: citations create a compounding advantage
The same Seer Interactive study found that brands cited in AI Overviews earn 35% higher organic CTR and 91% higher paid CTR compared to brands that are not cited. This means AI Mode and AI Overviews are not purely destructive for well-positioned brands, they create a significant performance gap between brands that are cited and those that are not.
Google has officially launched AI Mode in Search for users in the UK and beyond, marking a significant shift in how people interact with search results. Read the announcement here.
What is Google AI Mode?
Google AI Mode offers a major step forward in how people interact with search engines. Instead of just compiling blue links on a search results page, AI Mode uses advanced artificial intelligence - powered by a version of Google’s Gemini 2.5 model - to answer complex, nuanced questions in conversational language and with deeper context.
Source: Google
Key features of Google’s AI Mode include:
- A dedicated AI Mode tab appears in both desktop Search and the Google app on Android and iOS, allowing users to opt in easily.
- Users can pose multi-part queries or follow-up questions that would previously have required several searches, like planning a weekend trip, comparing products, or unpacking a complex how-to.
- The system employs a “query fan-out” technique, breaking a big question into subtopics, issuing multiple searches at once, and synthesizing an in depth, tailored answer with links for further exploration.
- AI Mode supports multimodal input: you can ask questions with text, voice, or images, enabling even richer search experiences.
- Early users are asking questions “two or three times the length” of standard search terms, highlighting how AI Mode enables more conversational and exploratory inquiry.
- When AI Mode can’t provide a confident answer, it defaults to regular search results -underscoring Google’s focus on balancing innovation with accuracy and transparency.
This launch signals a major shift in online search behaviour. For users, it means more natural, fast, and insightful answers, while for publishers and advertisers, it’s raising critical questions about visibility and referral traffic, since fewer users may click through to traditional sites.
What AI Mode means for B2B marketers
Google’s rollout confirms that AI native search is here to stay. For B2B brands, this means:
- Content strategies must evolve: Winning in generative search means aligning content with buyer questions, topics and tasks, not just keywords.
- Traditional SEO isn’t enough: You can rank #1 in classic search and still be absent from AI Overviews.
- Visibility = trust: If your brand or product isn’t cited in AI-generated content, it may not exist in the user’s shortlist.
At FirstMotion, we help B2B software companies adapt to this new world of Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO). From prompt mapping to AI visibility audits, we position brands where buying decisions are increasingly being made: inside AI tools.