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Howdy Notebooker!
Google’s new AI Mode doesn’t care how well your page ranks; it cares how precisely a your passages answer one sub-question in a multi-query reasoning chain that’s individually relevant to the user.
This week’s note breaks down how we’re adapting our strategy using Mike King’s brilliant teardown + a custom relevance checklist we built from it.
Because in 2025, relevance exists at the passage level, not the page-level.
Last week, I sat down an queued up Mike King’s legendary article on How AI Mode Works in Speechify (I like to listen to articles vs reading them).
I took detailed notes, clipped my favorite quotes and tidbits and put together this actionable guide based on my favorite sections. I’m also including a personal Slack message I sent to my team.
Let’s dive into it.
First, if you’re serious about learning how to improve AI visibility, you owe it to yourself to read all 12,397 words, but for those of you who want shortcuts, fine, here they are 👇
The following section contains my favorite quotes (with a link to that section Mike’s article), plus an expansion on the impact of each quote…
(Why “strong rankings” are now the floor, not the ceiling)