Chunks, Passages and Micro-Answer Engine Optimization Wins in Google AI Mode
Article by Jason Barnard, published by Search Engine Land
Google’s AI Mode synthesizes answers from multiple background queries. Here’s how to optimize content passages for inclusion in AI responses.
The best CRM article on Page 1 might lose to a single paragraph buried on Page 3.
That’s how AI search works now, and it’s why traditional SEO strategies are failing businesses that should be winning.
AI Mode: Synthesizing answers from multiple background queries
When you use Google’s AI Mode (the new tab next to All), you’re not getting a direct answer from one query.
You’re seeing a synthesized response created from a cascade of related questions that Google asks behind the scenes.
If you query [What’s the best CRM for SaaS startups?], the machine might also run:
- [What features do B2B founders care about?]
- [What’s the pricing model of HubSpot?]
- [Which CRMs integrate best with Slack and Zapier?]
The machine builds its answer from multiple fragments or chunks of content – the best passages it can find for each of those background queries.
That layered, stitched-together response is a summary of multiple queries related to the original query with a huge chunk of “informed guessing” about the original intent.
As a business (or a person), your presence in those results depends on the power of your digital brand echo – what Google’s AI believes about you or your company based on every web-wide brand signal.
Controlling your digital brand echo is the only thing that matters in modern SEO – a.k.a. generative engine optimization (GEO), assistive engine optimization (AEO), or whatever you choose to call it.
Dig deeper: How AI Mode and AI Overviews work based on patents and why we need new strategic focus on SEO
Ranking in Position 1 isn’t the be-all, end-all it once was
You don’t need to rank first for the primary query.
If any passage from your web-wide content ranks well for just one of the related cascading queries, you’ll be included in the final AI response.
And inclusion is everything.
I call this micro-AEO ranking – small, precise moments where a chunk (passage) of your content hits exactly what the machine is looking for and ranks first as one facet of the answer to a wider, explicit or implicit question.
In traditional SEO, your focus was on the entire page.
Now, your focus needs to be on being the best passage for one angle or facet of the user’s query intent.
Pages rank in the All tab, hyper-relevant passages win in AI Mode
Here’s the real shift:
- In the All tab, Google ranks full pages.
- In AI Mode, it ranks chunks – individual passages that answer a very specific sub-question in a larger chain/cascade of related queries.
That means you could be completely absent from Page 1 traditional search results, but still show up in AI Mode because you wrote the best paragraph on “CRM integrations for early-stage SaaS.”
This is what I call implicit ranking.
It’s not about what users see. It’s about what machines research behind the scenes.
As a business or SEO, this is opaque: you don’t know the query and yet you need to win it… with a single paragraph within one page within your digital ecosystem (your website is just one of the many opportunities you have, if you open your eyes).
One AI Mode response = a network of micro-wins stitched together
AI Mode is not one big win – it’s a dozen micro-wins stitched into a summary.
Google is choosing helpful, trustworthy, self-contained answers and stringing them together.
This isn’t limited to Google. The same logic applies in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot, and other assistive engines.
The difference between them is simply the balance of the algorithmic trinity they use.
The assistive engines protect the click — they summarize, interpret, and recommend
This is why I talk about:
- The perfect click (the direct-to-conversion path assistive engines are designed to give you).
- And zero-click reputation (how the person perceives your brand before ever visiting your website).
In a world where AI delivers the answer instead of linking to it, your goal is no longer to win the click.
Your goal is to be part of the answer.
What chunks, passages and micro-answer engine optimization mean for your strategy
If you’re optimizing your digital presence only for Google’s All tab, you’re fighting a battle that ended years ago.
Way back in 2020, Darwinism in search (a term coined following a conversation with Google’s Gary Illyes) was already pointing everyone to the multi-vertical approach to SEO and the “survival of the fittest,” with the whole page algorithm as the final arbiter.
In a Search Off the Record podcast episode in 2022, John Mueller irreverently referred to the whole page algorithm as “the super search engine,” and Gary Illyes used the term “universal mixer.”
They confirmed that a whole page algorithm exists at Google.
With AI Mode, the concept of Bing’s whole page algorithm and Google’s universal mixer takes on a whole new meaning.
To have any chance of being included in that one single multifaceted answer that doesn’t need a click, you have to provide the snippet that best answers one aspect of the question.
That is micro-answer engine optimization in a nutshell.
Dig deeper: Answer engine optimization: 6 AI models you should optimize for
Inclusion in AI answers is the new metric that matters
The shift from traditional SEO to GEO is well and truly here.
SEO is no longer about visibility in isolation. It’s about the usefulness of one of your snippets of content in synthesis for Google, ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity, and other assistive engines.
To earn your place in the AI-generated narrative, your content must deliver clarity, precision, and trust at the passage level.
You aren’t optimizing to rank. You’re optimizing to be included in the answer. And in the AI era, inclusion is everything.
Dig deeper: SEO in an AI-powered world: What changed in just a year
