Google Is Moving Searchers Into AI Mode. Publishers Are Paying for the Trip.

Google is no longer asking people whether they want to use AI. It is walking them there. For many users the Google homepage now shows an AI Mode button where the Search button used to be, and the "Ask anything" box that sits under an AI Overview opens a conversation in AI Mode instead of a fresh page of links.

The result, as TIME reported on September 29, is that millions of people who never signed up for a chatbot are now using one. Google says AI Mode has more than 1 billion monthly users. Sensor Tower estimated ChatGPT at roughly 1 billion monthly active users in May.

How the path into AI Mode works

There are now three common doors into AI Mode from an ordinary search:

• The homepage button. For many users, the Google homepage shows an AI Mode button where the classic Search button sat.
• The follow-up box. After an AI Overview, a search bar invites the user to "Ask anything." Typing there opens AI Mode. Google made this follow-up available on mobile worldwide in January.
• Links inside AI Overviews. Some underlined phrases inside AI Overviews now open an AI Mode answer instead of a website. We cover that test in a separate story.

AI Overviews themselves are now common. Similarweb estimates they appear on about 40 percent of U.S. Google searches. A Pew survey this summer found that 60 percent of Americans read the AI summaries at the top of search results, compared with 49 percent who use chatbots.

Why AI Mode behaves differently from AI Overviews

Kevin Indig, who writes the Growth Memo newsletter, told TIME that AI Overviews did not change behavior much: people still scrolled past them to check the links. AI Mode is different. Queries there are about three times longer than traditional searches, users brainstorm and plan inside it, and they tend to trust the answer and stay put.

"They will get an answer, and they'll barely go out of their way to see if it's correct. That means very few clicks." Kevin Indig, speaking to TIME

That is the core problem for publishers. A searcher who stays inside AI Mode does not visit the sources the answer was built from.

The traffic numbers so far

The data points available today all point in the same direction, even if none of them isolates AI Mode alone:

• Similarweb data analyzed by Axios shows U.S. visits to roughly 100 top news sites falling from above 70 million in 2024 to 47.6 million in July 2026.
• An Ahrefs study found AI Overviews were associated with a 58 percent drop in click-through rate to the top-ranking result.
• The share of people who use AI to shop online has roughly doubled in under two years, according to Similarweb.

Google's position is that it is adding links, not removing them. Robby Stein, Google's vice president of product for Search, told TIME the company has made a "dramatic increase in the amount of links in the content trays we're providing" and wants to "remain the connective tissue to the web."

What this means if you publish on the web

Three practical consequences follow.

Being cited matters more than ranking first. When the answer is the destination, the brands named inside it get the attention. Track whether your pages are cited in AI Mode and AI Overviews for the questions that bring you revenue, not just where you rank in the blue links.

Write for the follow-up question. AI Mode queries are longer and conversational. Pages that answer the obvious next question, in plain language near the top, give Google something to quote.

Measure impressions, not only clicks. Search Console now reports impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode, but not clicks. Read our explainer on what that report can and cannot tell you before you draw conclusions from it.

What to watch

Google has strong reasons to keep pushing. It owns the default search box for billions of people, and every query answered inside AI Mode is a query that did not go to ChatGPT. The open question is whether the sites that supply those answers can keep publishing if fewer readers ever arrive. We will be tracking Google's link changes, and the traffic data that follows them, every week.