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AI Mode Is Not SEO — It’s a Full-Blown Paradigm Shift

Google's new AI Mode just flipped search upside down — and most SEOs are flying blind. Here’s what’s changing, what it means, and how to stay in the game.

Author

Ian Mutuli
June 10, 2025

In partnership with

Welcome to Clickraven’s Growth Grind newsletter that is here to let you know the most important insights about Google’s new AI Mode so that you can plan for your organic future online.

Google’s I/O 2025 event was all about the AI products that the company is launching out into the market. AI Mode will play a huge role in the future of search as we know it.

If you think AI Overviews were the big shift, think again. Google’s AI Mode isn’t just “another feature” — it’s a complete rewrite of how search works. Keywords? Less relevant. Rankings? Mostly meaningless. Clicks? Becoming optional.

Mike King just dropped a monster breakdown of what AI Mode really is, how it works under the hood, and why 90% of SEO pros are not ready. This isn’t about blue links anymore — it’s about engineering relevance in a system built for reasoning, not rankings.

👉 If you’re serious about staying visible in a world where search is powered by LLMs and vector embeddings, read this. Then read it again.

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🚨 TL;DR: SEO is not ready for AI Mode.

1. AI Mode ≠ Traditional SEO

  • Google’s AI Mode is not just another version of SEO.

  • It uses generative retrieval, not classic ranking.

  • Your content doesn’t just get shown based on keyword matches — it’s reconstructed, reasoned over, personalized, and often cited without clicks.

2. What AI Mode Actually Does

  • Uses query fan-out: One user query explodes into 10–50+ synthetic sub-queries.

  • Retrieves passage-level chunks, not entire pages.

  • Ranks content based on semantic embeddings (dense retrieval)

  • Runs reasoning chains to build answers step-by-step.

3. Why Current SEO Tools Are Useless for This

  • SEO tools don’t:

    • Generate vector embeddings.

    • Simulate synthetic queries.

    • Track passage-level citations.

    • Analyze reasoning chains or user embeddings.

4. What You Actually Need to Compete

  • Engineer content to win passage-vs-passage comparisons.

  • Optimize for query clusters, not keywords.

  • Build structured, factual, answer-ready content.

  • Use multiple formats (text, video, audio, charts).

  • Monitor visibility in AI results, not just clicks or rankings.

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5. Clicks Are Dying

  • AI Mode = zero-click search on steroids.

  • SEO becomes a visibility and trust channel, not just a traffic driver.

  • Google wants to “do the Googling for you” — users may never visit your site.

6. Relevance Engineering Is the New SEO

SEO pros must become Relevance Engineers:

  • Understand how AI retrieves, ranks, and reasons.

  • Optimize content for inclusion in the AI answer synthesis pipeline.

  • Build internal tools to simulate and reverse-engineer fan-out queries.

7. You Must Rebuild Your Strategy Around This

  • Forget deterministic ranking.

  • Embrace probabilistic inclusion based on vector space and relevance.

  • Consider:

    • Semantic architecture

    • Persona-based tracking

    • Query journey modeling

    • Multimodal content creation

🧭 Final Takeaway

“If we keep pretending the old tools and old mindsets are enough, we won’t just be invisible in AI Mode… we’ll be irrelevant.”

What did I learn from this article in summary?

SEO is not dying, but it's mutating — fast. You either evolve into a Relevance Engineer or get left behind.

Still prefer to read the entire article for yourself? Here you go.

Watch out for our internal tools. We’ll be building them out and inviting some of you to use them along with us.

Bonus: Watch Google CEO talk about everything AI in his interview with Nilay Patel of The Verge here. Hint: he couldn’t answer why he is taking our content and spinning it up for AI Overviews without paying us, lol.

Until next time, have a good one!
The Growth Grind Team,
Part of Click Raven, Inc.