Track and Win Google AI Mode With Answer Radar

What the engine records, and how it differs from AI Overviews

For each approved question, Answer Radar asks Google AI Mode once per sample, with the geography you set on the project. If the project has none, it asks as the United States. It stores the answer text, which brands the answer named or recommended, and the sources it cited, each with its domain and a flag for you, a tracked competitor or a third party.

Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode are two engines. An Overview appears on some searches and not others, so an absent Overview is recorded as absence and an appearance rate travels with it. AI Mode is asked for directly and always generates an answer. It has no appearance rate, and the absence rules for Overviews do not apply to it.

Sources arrive two ways: as a list of cited addresses and as links attached to the answer text. Some are Google redirect links. When the real address is spelled out in the response it is used. When Google gives only an opaque token, the link is dropped rather than followed, so one sample costs exactly one request. A cited source can therefore be missing from the table.

Running an audit that includes it

Nothing extra to enable. The project form asks for Domain, Brand name, Competitors, Buyer segment, Category, Geography and Language. Geography decides which country the question is asked from.

Press Run audit. The dialog shows how many approved questions go to how many answer engines, and Google AI Mode is counted among them. Confirm and run. One credit is one measured sample, so each question costs one credit on this engine per sample, the same as any other. An answer that comes back empty is still charged, because the request ran.

Reading the Google AI Mode rows

Open a run from History. Under the heading Google AI Mode every question has a row with the Searched pill and a status. Expand it to see Recommended followed by the brands put forward, or No brand recommended, then the answer and a Citations table with the columns Domain and Who. Who reads You, Competitor or Other.

There is no Queries line on these rows. Other engines list the searches they ran. AI Mode does not report them, so there is nothing to list, and its samples are counted in query fan-out with that reason attached.

A row that is not an answer reads as one of two states. This engine returned an empty response means AI Mode produced no answer text. This engine failed to respond means the request failed. Neither is counted as your brand not being mentioned, and neither is read as absence the way a missing Overview is.

From a competitor row to a content decision

When AI Mode recommends a competitor, you have an ordinary gap. Open it, read what the answer said and look at the cited publishers. If a competitor's own page is cited, the content gap view shows which requirement your page fails. If a review or comparison page is cited, the fix may be a mention there.

Drafting is your assistant's job. Pull the gap and its evidence through the connector, have your assistant write the page or reply, save it as a fix and run the audit again. The number to watch is recommendation, because a page can be cited as a source without being the recommended answer.

Where the numbers appear

Each run page shows the Google AI Mode rows. Through the connector, answer_results_get returns Google AI Mode as its own segment, with its own sample counts, never averaged with another engine. The same view counts its samples and says why it has no queries to report.

FAQ