Analyze early data from Google’s AI Mode in STAT. This study of 40,000 keywords reveals a mere 12% overlap with traditional organic rankings and explores how the verbose, text-heavy nature of AI Mode is shifting the search landscape.

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Happy Friday, Moz fans. Today I want to talk to you about some of the early data we're seeing from AI Mode in STAT. 

So the data I'm going to share with you today, just a few different data points, and this is based on 40,000 keywords tracked in AI Mode and also in regular organic for comparison in STAT.

What it is it's the 10,000 MozCast terms on desktop and smartphone, and in two suburban locations, one in the US and one in the UK. So combined, that's 40,000 terms. 

So the first thing I want to talk about is overlap with organic, which I think is pretty interesting.

So I'll link some resources below. But the way that AI Mode works is it makes these sort of fan-out queries, that's Google's language, and then basically searches for some related search terms and brings those back in.

So this is looking at the first 10 URLs cited in AI Mode versus the top 10 regular organic ranks for the equivalent Google search. And incidentally, I don't think people will be putting the exact same queries into AI Mode as regular Google search. I'm just doing that for the sake of comparison here. I recommend that, for your own tracking, you use slightly different queries.

But as a reference point, in AI Overviews, we see an 88% overlap between the featured URLs in the AI Overviews and the top 10 organic directly beneath. 

So that's a pretty big overlap, very similar. In AI Mode, it's much lower. We only see a 12% overlap between the top 10 URLs featured in the regular organic and the top 10 featured URLs cited in the AI Mode rankings. So that's pretty low, and that's kind of what we would expect. That's indicative of the way that AI Mode is branching out to a sort of broader set of queries and topics, rather than just the exact one that you typed in, and then googling that in effect.

If we expand that to sites, it's obviously a little bit higher. So if we expand that to do the sites overlap, rather than just the specific URLs overlap, it's a bit higher, but not massively higher. So the chances are these are sufficiently different search terms that we're actually seeing completely different websites ranking.

The other data point that I want to share here is that the average rank of the AI Mode featured URLs in regular organic was about 4.5. This is comparing top 10 to top 10. So obviously, I would expect the average to be about 5.5.

So this indicates that AI Mode is picking slightly higher-ranked. It's not represented in the top 10. It's picking slightly higher-ranked URLs from a wider set of queries, rather than picking the full top 10 from one query, for example.

So this is probably even more punishing. If you're ranking in the bottom half of the SERP for the fan-out terms, this is even more punishing than being in the bottom half of the SERP would be normally.

The next thing I want to talk about is the idea of SERP features. So obviously, we're familiar with SERP features in regular organic. If I talk to you about things like images, local packs, video results, featured snippets, AI Overviews themselves, of course, you're familiar with these kinds of SERP features.

But AI Mode you can think of almost as a pure feature SERP. It has a lot of similar or even the same features, and we're parsing those as well.

So if I talk about some of the equivalents between AI Mode and a standard SERP, and we compare how common they are for the same terms, so a paragraph, the most common result or feature type or block in an AI Mode result is a paragraph of text by far. They tend to be quite verbose results. And the kind of equivalent in organic, I guess, would be an AI Overview, so that same sort of idea of a block of AI-generated text, of prose.

But whereas only about a quarter of these terms in regular organic, MozCast terms are somewhat commercial, only about a quarter of them had an AIO. 99.5% had a paragraph of text in AI Mode. And often as not, actually, I don't have that on screen, there will be a link below, but in the deeper data, you can see often as not that paragraph was the first result as well.

The kind of equivalent to organic results is cards. This is our language, not Google's. Google hasn't sort of given these different block types in AI Mode official names as far as we know. But we're calling this a card. So that's the thing in AI Mode that looks most like a regular organic result, and I'll include some pictures beneath. 

But about 62% or 63% of AI Mode results feature a card. So, a few results that are quite clicky in how they're represented, and they look more like an organic result than they do like a citation. Obviously, that contrasts with 100% of regular SERPs have organic results.

Images is an interesting one as well. Standard SERPs are actually a little bit more visual. Grid is the equivalent feature to an image block. Standard SERPs are a little bit more visual than AI Mode. AI Mode tends to be more text-heavy.

The other thing that I thought I would include is maps. So there's something that looks like a local pack in AI Mode. Obviously, there is as well in regular SERPs.

Regular SERPs are about twice as likely to trigger a map pack as the same term would be in AI Mode. So it's the same data being pulled out here, but AI Mode is a little bit more reluctant to trigger some of these features that we're familiar with, even though they're coming from the same place as far as we can tell.

The last thing I'm going to talk about is the sort of typical position of these different result types, which is also quite different. You might be looking at this and saying, "Oh, 60-something percent of AI Mode SERPs have something that looks like regular organic. That's great." Well, yeah, maybe not so fast.

So, this line chart, I've just picked out three features. I think we have more than 10, maybe a dozen features being tracked right now. This picks out just for three of them how common they are in different ranking positions as you move down. So this is position 1 on the AI Mode results, and this is position 10. We're only going down to Position 10 for the sake of this chart. This is Position 10 on the AI Mode results.

So you can see the first result is almost always, 90-something percent of the time, the first result is almost always a paragraph, that block of sort of verbose text. But then, as you come down, cards, which is the thing that resembles organic, cards sort of gradually build.

So normally, if there is something that resembles organic, it's right at the bottom of the AI Mode result. You have to scroll down quite far to find that thing that looks like organic. Whereas obviously, in regular SERPs, it's nowhere near as bad. You see organic in first place about half the time in our latest data.

So yes, there is often something that looks like organic. But no, it's still not quite as good as you would see, from our perspective as SEOs, as good as you might see the regular SERP as being.

The other result type I've included here is lists. I've just thrown that in because that's the third most common, and it sort of furthers that point that these are very text-heavy. A list is another text-heavy feature. These are very text-heavy results in general.

Anyway, I hope you found those data points interesting. There will be a lot more data to back this up, linked directly beneath. Thank you very much.