How I Spotted Google AI Mode Queries in My Search Console

Queries nobody types into a search box

When I pulled a 28-day Search Console export for this site, ending 6 September 2026, I read the query list line by line, because the aggregate numbers hide almost everything interesting. Nineteen of the queries did not look like search at all.

Some were bare fragments, meaningless on their own:

• until when?
• how is it different from others
• est ce vrai ?, French for "is it true?"
• πόσο κοστίζει;, Greek for "how much does it cost?", with the Greek question mark, which looks like a semicolon
• ليه ؟, colloquial Arabic for "why?"

One was a pasted block of text describing an ideal customer, the kind of persona people write as a prompt, ending in a French question: quelle est la solution de plateforme no-code la plus abordable ? ("what is the most affordable no-code platform?").

And several were long, fully formed questions, with the position this site held for each:

Nobody types until when? into Google and expects a useful result. Somebody types it into a conversation.

What Google says these are

Google has documented the two facts that explain the list. First, traffic from AI features, AI Overviews and AI Mode included, is counted in the normal Performance report, inside the Web search type. It is not broken out, so it sits in the same list as everything else.

Second, the Performance report help says that when someone asks a follow-up question within AI Mode, they are essentially performing a new query, and all impression, position and click data in the new response are counted as coming from that new query. So a follow-up turn is logged on its own, stripped of the conversation that gave it meaning. until when? is exactly what that looks like. So is est ce vrai ?, typed by someone checking an answer they had just been given.

The long questions are the kind of thing people type into AI Mode rather than into a search box. The same page adds that AI Mode and AI Overviews may use a query fan-out technique, issuing multiple related searches across subtopics to build a response. Whether those sub-queries appear in a site's own report is not documented. A few of the questions above are oddly specific, and some may be sub-queries, but I cannot tell them apart from a person's prompt, so I am not claiming that.

How to find them in your own Search Console

There is no AI Mode filter, so filter by shape. In the Performance report, open the query filter, choose Custom (regex), and try these one at a time. Search Console uses RE2 syntax.

# Long, fully formed questions
^.{60,}$

# Anything ending in a question mark, including the French spacing
\?\s*$

# Very short follow-ups that only make sense mid-conversation
^\S+( \S+){0,2}\s*[?;؟]$

# Scripts you do not write in (swap in your own)
\p{Greek}|\p{Arabic}

Read what comes back rather than counting it. The tell is not length or punctuation on its own. It is a query that presupposes something the searcher was just told.

What I changed

I write for passages, not pages. If AI Mode is pulling a passage to support an answer, the passage has to stand on its own: a question-shaped heading, then an answer of roughly 40 to 60 words that makes sense without the paragraph before it. Every page in the new use case library opens with a summary written that way, and the site's audit fails if one runs outside 35 to 95 words, so it can always be quoted whole.

I wrote for the buyer behind the long question. The 50-systems question is a procurement decision described in the buyer's own words, and the site was sitting at position 15 for it with a platform comparison that did not quite answer it. So I wrote the post that does, and the n8n comparison now hands off to it.

I stopped reporting the aggregate CTR. A report that mixes conversational turns, automated query permutations and real searches produces an average that describes none of them. The automated agent that ran 225 permutations of one query through the same report is the extreme case.

I made sure the other assistants can read the pages too. Google renders JavaScript, so AI Mode was never the problem, but most other AI crawlers read only the raw HTML. That is how I found that none of this site's structured data was visible to them.

What this does and does not show

Nineteen queries in 28 days is a small sample from a small site. It does not show that AI Mode sends meaningful traffic here, and I have no clicks to report from it. What it shows is narrower and still useful: people are asking Google questions in a conversational interface, in languages this site does not target, and the site is among the sources considered for some of the answers. If you only look at the top of the dashboard, you will never see any of it.

Frequently asked questions