When Google’s AI Mode ends an answer with an offer (“Want me to compare prices?”) and the user types “yes please”, that reply is processed as a new search. Google’s own Search Console documentation confirms follow-ups in AI Mode are reported as separate queries. So the turns of a conversation end up in the search data that website owners see, mixed in with normal keyword searches. I build analytics for Google Search Console, so I measured how much of this there is. I used 16 months of data (June 2025 to September 2026) from 155 websites and classified every query by its shape. What counts as a conversational query Reply artefacts: bare replies like “yes”, “ja graag”, “try again”, “show me”. Meaningless as a search, obvious as a chat turn. Pivot follow-ups: “what about salary”, “how about in chinese?”. They only make sense after a previous turn. Conversational questions phrased at a listener: “is it free”, “can you…”. What the data shows Reply artefacts went from 5.6 to 116 per million impressions (21x). They appear on 94 of the 155 sites. The steepest rise was January to May 2026. Pivot follow-ups grew 39x, from a very small base. On the median site, the conversational share of impressions went from 0.032% to 0.22% (7x). Pooled across all sites it fell, because a handful of very large sites with declining conversational-question traffic dominate the totals. If you only look at aggregates, you’d miss the trend. These queries get clicked 2.9% of the time, against 35.6% for all queries. Someone mid-conversation with an AI is reading the answer, not picking a link. For publishers, that’s the real story: the impression gets counted, but the visit doesn’t happen. A side finding: politeness varies by language Of the yes-replies, the share that includes please or thanks: German speakers 75% (“ja bitte”), Dutch 67%, English 40%, Finnish 8%, Indonesian 0%. I counted each phrasing once per site, so no single big site skews a language. This reflects language conventions more than manners: a bare “kyllä” is normal in Finnish. Limitations Google doesn’t label AI Mode traffic. This is a query-shape classifier, so it’s an inference. Some bare words are brand names or abbreviations, which is why I lean on the trend rather than any single query. Search Console hides rare (anonymised) queries, so all figures are shares of what Google reports. It’s still small: 0.13% of all impressions. Question for this sub: if conversational turns are becoming “searches”, search logs stop meaning what they used to. Is anyone seeing the same thing in other AI-search products, or in their own site data? submitted by /u/DutchSEOnerd
Originally posted by u/DutchSEOnerd on r/ArtificialInteligence
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