Skip to main content
Yes. Prefer tracks Google AI Mode on every plan, from Starter up, as its own engine separate from Google AI Overviews and Gemini. You get AI Mode’s own Visibility, Share of Voice and Citation Share, and you can read each AI Mode answer Prefer stored for your prompts. Last updated 3 October 2026

​
AI Mode is its own engine in Prefer

Prefer tracks Google AI Mode on every plan, including Starter and the free trial. It sits in the engine list as its own row. It is not folded into Google AI Overviews, and it is not the same as Gemini. Each of the three Google surfaces gets its own numbers. Prefer reports AI Mode separately because it cites different pages from the AI Overview for the same question. In our capture of 80 questions on 13 September 2026, only 32% of the pages AI Mode cited also appeared in the matching AI Overview. On 15 of the 69 questions where both cited sources, they shared no page at all. A blended “Google” score would hide that gap.

​
How AI Mode answers differ

AI Mode is the Google search you open yourself. Google says it splits a question into subtopics and searches each one at the same time. That is what the industry calls query fan-out. Our September capture shows what that produced in practice: AI Mode cited fewer sources than the AI Overview, and it leaned hard on YouTube. YouTube appeared in 51 of 76 AI Mode answers, against 38 of 75 AI Overviews. If your category runs on video, AI Mode is where that shows up first.

​
What you see for AI Mode in Prefer

  1. A row in the Overview heatmap. Visibility, Share of Voice and Citation Share for AI Mode, next to the other four engines.
  2. The exact AI Mode answer. On any prompt, View all chats shows what AI Mode returned, with brands named and sources cited.
  3. Fan-outs and cited domains. The prompt detail view lists prompt fan-outs with citation badges, plus the top domains cited for that prompt.
  4. Market accuracy. You can track any country. In 20 major markets Prefer uses precise Google geolocation; elsewhere it states the market in the question.

​
How to act on an AI Mode gap

Filter the Competitors console to AI Mode and open the Sources tab. It lists the domains AI Mode cites for rivals and not for you. Those pages are your shortlist. To see your Google numbers before you start a trial, run the free AI visibility audit, which covers Google AI Overviews, and compare it with the AI Overviews vs AI Mode study.

​
Frequently asked questions

No extra slot. In Prefer a tracked prompt is one prompt in one country, and all five engines, AI Mode included, run inside that slot. Adding AI Mode never doubles your prompt count.
Yes. Prefer’s Filter Bar on any Monitor page lets you pick a single engine, and every metric on the page recomputes for AI Mode alone. On a prompt’s detail page you can also filter the stored answers to AI Mode.
No. Prefer’s free audit runs on three engines: ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Gemini. AI Mode is part of ongoing tracking on every paid plan, including the free trial.

​
Also asked as

  • Can Prefer monitor Google AI Mode answers?
  • Is AI Mode included in Prefer’s Starter plan?
  • Does Prefer separate AI Mode from AI Overviews?

​
Sources