A few months ago, the idea of asking Google search questions in a conversational way sounded like science fiction. Today, it’s happening, and it’s shifting how search works, fast. Google’s new AI Mode has moved out of Labs and into real use. It officially launched in the United States via Search Labs before becoming a full feature in June 2025, followed by India—first behind a Labs toggle and now generally available and the United Kingdom in July 2025, accessible via a dedicated tab in Search and through the app for English-speaking users.

This matters because “search visibility” is no longer just about ranking pages. Now businesses must optimize for three intertwined domains.

First is classic SEO, making sure pages are crawlable, fast, mobile-optimized, and include clear on-page signals like meta tags and structured data. Then there’s AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) structuring content so AI-driven interfaces can extract direct answers, with concise responses, FAQs, and explicit provenance (author, timestamp, verifiable data). And finally GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) the emerging craft of helping AI systems understand not just what's on your site, but how your content serves intent, context, and cross-query coherence.

Put simply: your content isn’t just a webpage anymore, it’s data, context, and an asset that must survive “no click” experiences and answer engines that synthesize rather than link.

For Indonesian businesses, this evolution is both opportunity and risk. If your content is well structured and authoritative, it may be used as a grounding source in Google AI Mode, which is now a discovery surface in its own right in the US, India, and UK. But if you’re reliant on traffic-driven performance only, you risk being hidden as AI piping the answers directly in SERPs, without users clicking through. This will impact how marketing teams measure success, how budgets are justified, and how content is prioritized.

AI Overviews, Google’s earlier generative summaries have already reached over 200 countries, including Indonesia, and in multiple languages beyond English.

But AI Mode changes the game: it’s conversational, multimodal (text, voice, image), and designed to handle complex, multi-part queries with “query fan-out,” where multiple sub-queries are issued and the results aggregated into a single, synthesized answer.

So far, traffic data in the US shows clickthrough rates dropping because users are getting answers without needing to click, and that has broader implications for content-heavy sites relying on regular SEO visibility (Zero Click topic).

What can businesses do?

• First, keep SEO fundamentals strong site speed, mobile usability, structured data, canonicalization, content clarity.

• Second, invest in AEO, crafting content that directly answers user intent in plain language, with clear sources and metadata.

• Third, adopt early-stage GEO thinking: design content architectures that support AI’s need for structured logic and provenance, such as annotated FAQs, clear voice-of-author signals, and internally consistent topic clusters.

• Fourth, begin to monitor not just clicks, but citation visibility where your content is mentioned or used by AI Mode or Overviews, even if no click occurs.

• And finally, treat this shift not as a gimmick, but as an imperative: doubling down on quality, clarity, and structure ensures you remain visible, whether users click or ask a robot to answer.

The search landscape has fundamentally shifted. Google’s AI Mode is not a feature, it’s the direction. Indonesian businesses that treat SEO merely as keyword chase are already losing pace. Think clearly, build structure, win citations. That’s how you remain found when Google answers for you.

Ready to audit your site for SEO, AEO, and GEO? Book a 30-45 minutes consultation with our team sales@binari.co.id