Concepts

AI Mode

AI Mode is Google's conversational search tab: a full chat-style answer experience inside Google Search, where the person asks in sentences, gets a written answer, and asks again. Joe Ashta, a GEO / AEO consultant for law firms, treats it as a surface distinct from AI Overviews. This page describes what AI Mode is, what happens behind the answer, how it differs from an AI Overview, what it means for a person choosing a lawyer, and what a firm has to cover to be named in it.

A conversation inside Google Search

AI Mode is a tab beside the ordinary results. The person types a question the way they would say it, and the response is a written answer with links to the pages it drew on, in place of the list of ten links. They can then ask a follow-up in the same thread, and the system carries the earlier turns forward. A person can start with "what should I do after a car accident in BC" and end, several turns later, with "which of those firms takes cases on contingency and has an office in Surrey".

Fan-out: several searches behind one answer

The mechanism that separates AI Mode from an ordinary search is fan-out. When a question arrives, the system breaks it into several sub-queries and runs them at once, each against Google's index. "Which personal injury firm in Surrey should I hire for a car accident" might fan out into searches for personal injury firms in Surrey, for the car accident claim process in BC, for contingency fee arrangements, for reviews of specific firms, and for the limitation period. The pages returned by each sub-query are pulled into the system's context, the step the glossary calls grounding, and one answer is written from all of them.

The person sees one answer. Behind it are several retrievals, each with its own set of pages and its own winners.

How AI Mode differs from AI Overviews

An AI Overview is a summary placed above one set of results, for one query. AI Mode is a whole results experience. The differences follow from that.

Scope. An Overview answers the query as typed. AI Mode answers the question the conversation has built up to, across every turn so far.
Retrieval. An Overview draws on the results for one query. AI Mode draws on the results for several sub-queries at once.
Persistence. An Overview appears once, and a new search starts over. AI Mode keeps the thread, so an answer in turn four rests on what was established in turns one to three.
Where the person ends up. Under an Overview, the classic results remain and many people scroll to them. In AI Mode the answer is the page, and the links it shows are the only route out.

The two share an index, so a firm well positioned for one is usually better positioned for the other. They are counted separately on the BigLaw GEO Leaderboard for that reason: Ahrefs reports citations in each, and the counts for the same firm differ.

What it means for a person choosing a lawyer

Choosing a lawyer in AI Mode is a multi-turn narrowing. The first turn is usually about the problem: what the charge means, what the claim is worth, whether the deadline has passed. The second asks what kind of lawyer handles it. The third asks for names in a place. The fourth and later turns compare the names: who takes contingency, who has run trials, who has an office nearby, what the reviews say. The shortlist at the end is two or three firms, each with a sentence of reasoning, and the person contacts one of them. Each firm on that shortlist has a mention; the one the answer suggests contacting first has a recommendation.

A firm can drop out at any turn, and absence is silent. The person never sees the firms that failed a sub-query.

What a firm has to cover

Because the system asks several sub-questions behind each answer, a firm needs a page that can be retrieved for each of them. A firm with one strong "personal injury lawyer Surrey" page and nothing else is retrievable for one sub-query out of five. The other four are answered from other sites, and the firm's name is carried into the answer only if those other sites mention it.

Covering the sub-questions means, for each practice area the firm wants to be named for: a page on the practice area in each place the firm serves; pages on the process, the timelines, the costs and the fee arrangements; lawyer profiles that state credentials and case types in plain terms; and a consistent statement of the firm's name, place and practice across the site, the lawyer profiles, the directories and the bar records, so that the firm resolves as the same entity in every sub-query where it appears. That is the work this site describes as AEO, and its report is a mention rate. The canonical statement of who Joe Ashta is and what he does is the entity record. Law firm AI search shows what the answers look like from the buyer's side.