When someone searching in your service area types a question into Google's AI Mode, they're not typing two or three words anymore. They're describing their exact situation in detail, and they expect a direct answer. If your website doesn't answer that specific question in the first few sentences, Google's AI has no reason to send that customer to you instead of the business down the street whose page does.
Queries Are Now Three Times Longer
Google's own data science team confirmed the shift. In research published in May 2026, Google VP of Data Science and UXR Shivani Mohan reported that AI Mode search queries now average roughly three times the length of a typical Google search. More than one in six AI Mode searches now include something other than typed text, like a photo or a voice question, and image-based queries are growing more than 40% month-over-month.
The takeaway is simple: AI Mode users are describing their whole situation up front, and they're rewarding whichever business answers that full situation first.
Why This Matters for a Local Business
Google groups these longer queries by what the searcher is trying to do: Explore, Decide, Learn, Create, or Do. The "Do" queries, the ones closest to someone ready to book a service right now, are growing 80% faster than AI Mode traffic overall over the past six months. That's the exact moment a plumber, dentist, or contractor wants to show up, and it's the moment easiest to lose if your website makes the customer dig for the answer.
Rewriting for the Longer Question
Rewrite your homepage and service pages so the first two sentences of each section state exactly what you do, where you do it, and any key number, like your service area cities, response time, or price range, instead of making readers hunt for it.
Add a short FAQ section to your key service pages that mirrors real follow-up questions customers ask, like financing, same-day availability, licensing, or typical cost ranges.
Break long paragraphs into short, 2 to 3 sentence chunks under clear subheadings, so both human readers and AI systems can find the specific answer quickly.
Add real project photos with descriptive alt text. Image-based queries are one of the fastest-growing parts of AI Mode, and visual content is now a ranking signal, not filler.
Keep your Google Business Profile services list and description just as specific and current as your website. It's another surface AI Mode pulls answers from.
A full website redesign is not the ask here. Writing your existing pages the way you would answer a customer on the phone is, clearly, specifically, and up front.
Further reading: AI Overviews Are Now Answering Most Local Searches: Is Your Business Still Invisible?
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