WHAT IS AI MODE?

AI Mode breaks your content into 700-character passages, turns each into a vector using Sentence-BERT-style embeddings, and compares those vectors to the original query — and a "fan-out" of sub-queries — using cosine similarity. This isn’t about keywords or entities. It’s about geometric proximity in vector space.

In AI Mode:

• Relevance is calculated mathematically, not lexically.
• Entire pages don’t rank — individual passages do.
• Semantic alignment beats topical completeness.
• Authority matters only after similarity is established.

WHY TRADITIONAL SEO ISN'T WORKING

Most SEO strategies today are optimized for outdated models. Tools still score pages based on keyword frequency and topic cluster depth. Recovery plans focus on site-wide metrics instead of passage-level performance. “Helpful content” is treated as a writing task — not a semantic alignment challenge.

AI Mode requires a new playbook. One built on embeddings, similarity scores, and content geometry.

WHAT THE DATA SHOWS

Teams who misunderstood AI Mode often saw:

• No recovery after major rewrites.
• Topical pages losing to semantically sharper competition.
• Passage misalignment — not page quality — as the real failure.
• Authority matters only after similarity is established.

The AI Overviews rollout in Spring 2024 made this shift visible. But the change happened long before that.

A NEW APPROACH TO SEO IN THE A.I. ERA

To succeed under AI Mode, you need to:

• Evaluate passage similarity, not just page-level topics.
• Realign content embeddings with actual search intents.
• Understand how your content scores — by prompt, by chunk.
• Build your site’s “AI visibility profile” from the ground up.

This isn’t theory. It’s measurable. And it’s already changing how leading SEO teams operate.