Google AI Mode

What it means in practice

AI Mode is entered deliberately and answers follow-up questions in context, while an Overview is served into a normal results page. They draw on different retrieval behavior and frequently cite different sources for the same question, so a brand strong in one can be absent from the other. Measuring them as one number hides that split.

How refd treats it

This is category vocabulary, not a refd metric. refd measures what AI answers actually said across repeated runs, and publishes the raw answer behind every number. Where a term above carries a claim about what causes visibility, refd treats that claim as a hypothesis to test rather than a setting to configure.

This definition is editorial. It describes how the term is used across the field rather than something the software computes, so unlike the metric pages it is not generated from the product.