Google AI Mode and AI Overviews: what changes for webshops

Until recently, a Google search for "waterproof winter boots for women" meant ten blue links, a few Shopping ads and a customer opening three or four webshops in separate tabs. In 2026, more and more searches like this end in an AI-generated answer that compares products, explains the differences and recommends a handful of options. The customer reaches your website less often, but when they do, they are much closer to buying. In this article I explain what AI Overviews and AI Mode are, what concretely changes for a webshop selling in Denmark, what data Google uses to choose the products it recommends and what you can do in the next 30 days. There is an interactive check halfway through so you can test your own product pages. Examples use DKK. AI Overviews and AI Mode: the difference AI Overviews are AI-generated summaries that appear above the regular results for some searches. The results page stays the same, except the first thing the customer sees is a written answer with a few cited sources. AI Mode is a separate search mode with its own tab in Google. It works like a conversation: the customer asks a long question, gets a detailed answer and can then follow up with more questions without starting over. AI Mode has been available in Denmark, in Danish, since autumn 2025, and is now live in more than 200 countries. The key difference for a webshop: in AI Overviews, the customer still sees the classic results underneath. In AI Mode, most of the time they don't see them at all. Everything they learn about your product comes from what the AI chose to include in its answer. What a shopping search looks like in AI Mode Let's take a concrete example. A customer in Aarhus types into AI Mode: "I'm looking for waterproof winter boots for women, for the city, that don't slip on ice, under 1,000 kr., size 38." Google doesn't search for that exact sentence. It splits it into several smaller searches, a process called query fan-out : what waterproof means for footwear,…