Google AI Mode left the lab: you get cited or you get summarized
Google launched AI Mode in May 2025, and by the second half it was no longer a toy toggle. It is a conversational experience, with fan-out sub-searches, that does not show you ten blue links. AI Overviews still sit on the classic SERP; AI Mode is the other board. In both cases the game is citation, not only rank.
For a clinic, spa, or agribusiness in Costa Rica it feels like this: the customer asks “who builds converting sites in San José” or “SINPE gateway for a store” and stays in the answer. If your page is an adjective brochure, the model paraphrases whoever did write price, timeline, and coverage. That is AEO: Answer Engine Optimization. Not a plugin. How the site is written.
What a page needs in order to be cited
- An answer in the first block: what you do, for whom, in which country.
- FAQ and schema a model can extract without guessing.
- Consistent company and product names. Models do not forgive three legal names.
- Proof: cases, contact, pages that do not live only in opaque JavaScript.
Conversion, Google, and AEO in one plan
Our websites are not sold as “presence.” They are sold as high conversion, Google presence, and AEO. Hosting is in the same plan because a slow site does not rank and does not get cited. If the traffic that still arrives does not close, the problem is not “more keywords.” It is the form, the offer, and speed.
The blue link fights for a click. AEO fights for a sentence with your name in it.
If Search Console already looks weird and nobody cites you, let us take the site. We review it the way a model reads it, not the way a design contest does.