The Two-List Worksheet – Mathew's Library

01 Two lists inside one answer

Google's AI answers (AI Overviews and AI Mode) can now carry ads. Inside the answer they look like the other recommendations, set apart by one small word: Sponsored. In SE Ranking's check of about 50,000 shopping-type searches in AI Mode at the end of June, almost one in three came back with a text ad.

So every answer can hold two lists:

Cited. The sources the AI used and links to. Nobody paid for these spots. Sponsored. The companies that paid for a labelled seat in the answer.

They are mostly different companies. On 88% of the searches with an ad, the advertiser wasn't one of the sources the AI cited. It's one snapshot from a company that sells SEO tools, and it shows overlap, not cause.

Being cited is worth knowing about. Seer Interactive tracked 53 brands: when an AI Overview showed and the brand was cited, it got about 120% more organic clicks per impression than when it wasn't.

Paying got those companies a seat in the answer. It didn't get them cited.

02 Pick five buying questions

Write down five questions your customers ask right before they buy. Not keywords. Real questions. Long ones matter most: in Pew Research's data, searches of ten words or more got an AI summary 53% of the time.

Sales calls. The question that comes up just before someone says yes or asks for a price.

Your inbox. Questions people email before they order or book.

Search Console. Google's free report on how people find your site. Open Performance, then the Queries tab, and look for searches written as questions.

03 Run them and fill three columns

Open a private browser window, so you're logged out. Go to Google, open AI Mode, and ask the first question word for word. Take a screenshot of the whole answer. Fill one row of the worksheet. Repeat for all five.

Two-list worksheet

Question: [THE CUSTOMER'S QUESTION, WORD FOR WORD]
Date checked: [DATE]
Who got cited: [COMPANIES THE ANSWER LINKS TO AS SOURCES]
Who's sponsored: [COMPANIES MARKED SPONSORED]
Where I am: [CITED / SPONSORED / MISSING]
Rule for this one: [EARN / PROTECT / TEST A PAID SEAT]

04 One rule for each result

Competitors cited, you're not: earn it

Open the pages the AI cited and look at what they answer that yours doesn't:

The answer near the top. The question answered in the first lines, not after the intro.

A real comparison. Options side by side, including yours.

A price. Or what decides it.

What other people say about you. Reviews and mentions, not only your own words.

You're cited: protect it

In Search Console, look at clicks and impressions separately, not only the click rate. Seer saw cited brands' impressions more than double while their clicks stayed flat, so the click rate looked like it crashed when nothing was lost.

The question is expensive and you can't win the citation: test a paid seat

SE Ranking found ads on more than half of the searches where a click costs ten dollars or more. That's the one place a paid seat might be worth testing.

05 Before you pay for the seat

What Google's help page says. You can't target only the spots inside AI Overviews, you can't opt out of them, and there's no separate reporting. Those ads are counted as top ads.

Ads from Search campaigns with broad match, Shopping and Performance Max can show there. If you run those, you may already be in AI answers. Ads inside AI Overviews show in English in 12 countries, including the U.S., Canada and Australia. In healthcare it's still rare: in SE Ranking's data, healthcare searches had an ad less than 3% of the time.

Start here. Run one customer question in AI Mode today. Were you cited, sponsored, or missing?

Sources

SE Ranking: AI Mode shows ads on 1 in 3 queries, 50K keywords studied Seer Interactive: AIO Impact on Google CTR, 2026 Update Pew Research Center: Do people click on links in Google AI summaries? Google Ads Help: About ads and AI Overviews

Mathew's LibraryLibrary card

Free access

Keep reading free with your library card

One email opens this template and all 86 resources in Mathew's library. No account, no password.