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A year of AI Mode in the Netherlands: how your customers search now
· 2 min read · 2 sources
Google Nederland
On 8 October 2025, Google began rolling out AI Mode in the Netherlands. It is a separate tab in Google Search and the Google app, where you ask a question and get a written answer with links. A year later, it has become an ordinary way of searching for many people.
What AI Mode is
Google calls it its most powerful AI search feature, meant for complex questions and follow-ups. The October 2025 rollout added 35 new languages, Dutch among them, and almost 50 new countries, the Netherlands among them. That makes AI Mode available in more than 200 countries and territories.
People ask more, and Google searches further
According to Google, early users ask questions in AI Mode that are two to three times as long as regular searches. Not 'plumber Utrecht' any more, but 'which plumber in Utrecht can fix a leaking tap this week and roughly what does that cost'.
Behind the scenes, AI Mode splits such a question into sub-questions and searches them all at once. Google calls this query fan-out. So your business can end up in the answer through a sub-question, even if you never targeted the whole question.
Sometimes Google shows no answer
Google writes that it wants to show an AI answer as often as possible, but that you get regular search results when it is not confident enough in the answer. So an AI answer appears mainly where Google finds enough reliable information.
What does this mean for you?
- Write on your site, in plain words, what you do, for whom, where, how fast and roughly what it costs. Those are the sub-questions AI Mode searches for.
- Give each service its own page. A general 'Services' page answers no single sub-question well.
- Make sure your name, location and description are the same everywhere: on your site, in your Google Business Profile and on the sites that write about you. That makes it easier for Google to be confident.
Get AI to recommend you
Oddrank measures every week whether ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Google name you, shows who is named instead, and sets out what to do about it.