Google just published a year of data on how Americans actually use AI Mode, and buried in the middle of a very pretty PDF full of floating bananas is a fact that should reorganize your entire marketing budget.
We will get to it. First, the part everyone quotes.
The numbers Google put on the record
Google launched AI Mode in the U.S. at I/O in May 2025. One year in, here is where it stands, according to Google’s own report:
- AI Mode has passed one billion monthly active users globally.
- AI Mode queries have more than doubled every single quarter since launch.
- Google says its new AI features are “the leading reason why we’re seeing queries at an all-time high.”
That last one is worth sitting with, because it contradicts the thing every marketing newsletter has been shouting for two years. Search is not dying. Search is at a record high. Google’s own framing is that AI is “driving the most significant transformation of Search in its history,” and that AI Mode “isn’t just changing how people search, it’s expanding the very definition of what’s searchable.”
More searching, not less. It is just that the searching looks nothing like it used to.
People stopped talking to Google like a robot
Here is the behavioral shift, in three findings.
The average AI Mode query is triple the length of a traditional search query. Google’s phrasing: “People are no longer worrying about the ‘right way’ to formulate their questions. They’re just asking.”
Follow-up queries in AI Mode increased by more than 40% on average per month in the U.S. Nobody asks one question anymore. They ask, then narrow, then narrow again.
The top five first words in AI Mode queries are: What, How, I, Is, Can. The top five keywords across all AI Mode searches: Find, Information, Identify, Explain, Summarize.
Read that list of first words again. I. People are starting search queries with the word “I,” as in “I need someone who can come out Saturday and I have two dogs.” That is not a keyword. That is a sentence a person says to another person.
Twenty years of SEO advice was built on the premise that humans would translate their actual problem into robot-speak before typing it. “plumber myrtle beach.” That premise just expired. The customer is now describing their whole situation, and something is reading the description and picking a business.
The finding that should reorganize your budget
Now the buried one.
Google listed the top subjects of follow-up conversations when people ask AI Mode about stores or shops. Number one on that list, above every category and every product type, is:
“Near me.”
And when Google listed the top retail attributes people look for when shopping in AI Mode, the ranking went: Price. Location. Then color, brand, and availability.
Location is the second most important attribute in the entire shopping experience, and proximity is the single most common follow-up when a real person is trying to find a real store. Google’s own note on this: “People don’t just ask AI Mode about a store, they ask AI Mode to help them find a store that can meet their needs in the moment.”
Local is not a niche inside AI search. Local is close to the middle of it.
If you run a business in Myrtle Beach, Columbia, Greenville, Florence, or Charleston and you have been treating AI search as a big-brand problem that will eventually trickle down to you, the data says the opposite. It arrived at your door first.
The queries are absurdly specific now, and that is the opportunity
Google published real example queries. Here is one from the Food and Drinks category:
“Help me find a romantic restaurant for a date night this Saturday with intimate seating, candlelight & cozy vibes. Make sure it has pescatarian and vegetarian options.”
And here are the top restaurant attributes people ask about in follow-up conversations: kid and family friendly, view, bar, vegan and vegetarian options, outdoor seating, private or party room, live music, dog friendly, dancing.
Look at what that list actually is. It is not marketing copy. It is facts about your business. Do you have a patio. Do you take dogs. Is there a room in the back for a birthday party. Is the thing in stock.
Under the old rules, those details were nice-to-have. They were the stuff you meant to add to your website in 2023. Under the new rules they are the deciding inputs, because an answer engine cannot recommend a fact it cannot find. There is no “close enough” in an AI answer. There is no page two. Your business is either in the answer or it is not, and the tiebreaker is frequently whether some machine could confirm that you have outdoor seating.
Google also found that planning queries have grown 80% faster than AI Mode queries overall in the past six months, and searches beginning with “which” have grown 40% faster than AI Mode overall, with “which of” and “which one” leading. People are outsourcing the comparison step. The shortlist is being built before anyone visits your website.
Search is not just text anymore
One more shift, and it is the one almost nobody has adjusted for.
More than one in six AI Mode searches are multimodal, meaning non-text. Voice, images, video, and live conversation with Search. Searches with image input are among AI Mode’s fastest-growing query types, growing by more than 40% month over month since launch.
Somebody is standing in front of a broken water heater, photographing it, and asking who can fix this. Somebody is pointing a camera at a part number. “Repair a car” is the number one thing people ask about when their query starts with “where to” or “where should I.”
Your photos are now search results. The pictures on your Google Business Profile are not decoration anymore, they are index entries.
So what do you actually do about it
Five things, in order, and none of them require you to understand a large language model.
- Make your business facts machine-readable. Hours, service area, parking, payment types, whether you are dog friendly, whether you deliver, what you actually carry. Complete every field on your Google Business Profile and repeat those facts on your website in plain sentences. An answer engine assembles recommendations from what it can verify. Make yourself easy to verify.
- Answer real questions in real language. Write the page that says “How much does a website cost in Myrtle Beach” rather than “Our Web Design Solutions.” People are asking in sentences that start with What, How, and I. Your content should contain those sentences and then answer them directly, near the top, not in paragraph nine.
- Add structured data. Schema markup is how you hand a machine your facts in a format it cannot misread. We wrote a whole thing on schema markup for local businesses if you want the detail.
- Keep reviews flowing. AI leans hard on reputation signals when it recommends. Recency matters as much as volume. This has been true for local SEO for years, and AI search has raised the stakes rather than changed the rules.
- Get your photos in order. If one in six searches is non-text and image search is growing 40% a month, the visual record of your business is doing real work. Current photos. Real photos. Enough of them.
Notice that not one of those is exotic. Google’s own data suggests the businesses winning AI search are the ones that had their fundamentals right and then optimized for the new layer. There is no shortcut that skips the basics. There never is.
What we have already built for this
Fair question to ask an agency writing about AI: what are you actually doing, versus what are you just describing.
We built a service around it before it was obvious. Local SEO and AI search is one of our six core services, not a line item we added last quarter because the news cycle turned. We have been publishing on answer engine optimization since 2025, including what AI search optimization means for SC businesses and how to get your business recommended by ChatGPT.
We structure client content for answer engines, not just for rankings. Key takeaways near the top. Direct answers in the first two sentences of a section. FAQ blocks written the way people actually ask, which per Google’s data now means full questions starting with What, How, and Can. Pages built to be quoted, not just to be crawled.
We treat business facts as infrastructure. Google Business Profile fully built out and kept current, service areas configured deliberately by town, schema markup implemented, and name-address-phone consistency maintained everywhere it appears. This is the unglamorous work that decides whether a machine can confirm you exist.
We automate the review engine. Review requests fire automatically after a completed job through our Marketing in a Box system, so reputation compounds without anyone remembering to ask. When an AI assistant weighs you against a competitor, the review gap is often the whole decision.
We use AI in the work itself, and we say so. Conversation AI answering inbound questions and booking appointments for clients. AI-assisted drafting and research, edited by an actual person before anything ships. We are not precious about it and we are not secretive about it, which is roughly our position on tools generally.
We are doing it to ourselves too. This post exists because we read a twenty-seven page Google report the week it came out and turned it into something useful for our clients. That is the job.
The honest timing read
Most local businesses will not touch any of this until it is undeniable, which is exactly why doing it now works. Being early to a search shift is how small businesses leapfrog bigger, slower ones. It happened with Google in 2005 and with mobile in 2013, and the people who moved early spent the next decade being described as lucky.
You do not need a big budget. You need clear content, verifiable facts, real reviews, decent photos, and to start before your competitor’s nephew reads the same PDF.
Want to know whether an answer engine can currently understand your business? Get a free Visibility Scorecard. We will check how findable and answer-ready you are across search and AI, then send a plain-English read on what to shore up first. Twenty-four hours, no call required.
The future of search is a conversation. Make sure your business is in it.
Keep it flyt. 馃殌
Source: Google Search, “How people are using AI Mode in the U.S.” All figures cited are from Google’s report, based on internal Google Search and Google Trends data covering AI Mode’s U.S. launch in May 2025 through April 2026. Google notes that Trends data is drawn from a random, unbiased sample of searches and reflects proportional search interest rather than absolute query counts. AI Mode Trends data is not publicly available on trends.google.com.