Google AI Mode and your business website. You don't need a special file for AI

A woman types a whole sentence into Google. She wants a hairdresser nearby who also cuts children's hair and is open on Saturdays. Instead of a list of websites she gets a few paragraphs of answer, with links to a handful of salons next to it. That is Google AI Mode.

For a business owner, what matters is whether your website can be one of those links, and whether you can do anything about it.

What Google AI Mode is

Google launched AI Mode in Poland on 8 October 2025, in Polish from the start. It appears as a separate tab on the results page and in the Google app on phones. It is meant for longer questions, the kind where you would normally open several pages.

Google splits such a question into smaller topics and runs several searches at once. It puts what it finds into one answer and adds links to the pages it used. Google itself warns that the answers will not always be correct. When the system isn't confident in an answer, it shows regular results instead.

The most important line in Google's announcement is a dull one. AI Mode is built on the same quality and ranking systems as regular Search. There is no separate list you have to sign up for.

What Google tells site owners

Google has a separate guide for site owners about AI features in Search. It says there are no additional requirements and no special optimisation for AI Mode. You don't have to create new files for AI or add extra markup. There is no special structured data to add either.

There is one condition. A page has to be indexed and eligible to appear in Google with a snippet, the short piece of text under the title. This is easy to break by accident. If someone put a nosnippet tag on your page, Google shows no snippet, and the page no longer meets the condition.

If your site has structured data, meaning information about your business written into the code for robots, it has to match what people see on the page. If the code gives one set of opening hours and the text gives another, fix it.

Google counts traffic from its AI features together with the rest of your search traffic in Google Search Console, in the Performance report.

A page a crawler can read

Since there are no tricks, what's left is an ordinary page that tells both a person and a robot what you do. On small business sites we look at four things first.

• Text that says something specific. "Comprehensive services of the highest standard" tells neither a customer nor Google anything. "We cut children's and adults' hair, Saturdays too" does. The page should say what you do, for whom and where you work.
• Content as text, not pictures. Opening hours in a graphic, or a service list photographed from a sheet of paper, are hard for a robot to read. Google asks for important content to be available in text form.
• A separate page for each service. AI Mode breaks a question into smaller topics, and a page about one service answers one of those topics directly. Google also asks that your content be easy to reach through links within the site.
• An open robots.txt. If this file blocks Google's crawler, the page won't be in regular results or in AI answers. Google adds that a hosting company or a CDN can block the crawler too.

robots.txt may also contain an entry for Google-Extended. It decides whether your content can be used to train Gemini models and in answers in the Gemini apps. Google says it does not affect whether a site is included in Google Search, so blocking it does not take you out of the results.

We wrote more about this in What a crawler sees when it opens your site.

Your Business Profile counts too

In the same guide Google mentions keeping your Business Profile information up to date. For a local service business, the profile is often the first place where someone sees your hours, address and reviews.

Fill in the category, hours, service area, services and the link to your website. The description can be up to 750 characters. Use it to say in plain sentences what you do and for whom, the same as on your site. When the profile and the site say the same thing, nobody has to guess. We went through each field in Google Business Profile, what to fill in.

What nobody can promise

Google says that even a page that meets every condition is not guaranteed to be indexed or shown. And the AI answer you see today may look different tomorrow.

So if someone promises that after their service Google will start recommending you in AI Mode, ask how they know. From what Google publishes, what helps is the same as in regular Search. A clear site that robots can read, and a complete profile.

Today, ask AI Mode the question your customer would ask, and look at which pages Google links to. Then check in our free website scan whether your robots.txt blocks search and AI crawlers.