What AI Mode is actually doing
AI Mode runs a fan-out. It breaks your query into several sub-questions, retrieves candidate passages for each, then assembles an answer with links to the sources it used. You are not competing for a ranking position. You are competing to own one passage that answers one sub-question better than anyone else.
That changes what a good page looks like. A page covering ten related questions clearly beats a page covering one question exhaustively, because it has ten chances to be the cited passage.
Structure that gets picked up
Use the real question as an H2, phrased the way a person would type it. Answer it immediately underneath in one or two sentences that make sense lifted out of context. Then expand.
Avoid opening paragraphs that set the scene. If the first sentence under a heading is ’In today’s fast-moving landscape’, there is nothing there to quote.
The technical floor
The page has to be crawlable, fast and rendered without JavaScript blocking the content. Anything Google has to work to read is a candidate it can skip in favour of an easier one. Check that your key answers are in the HTML source and not injected client side.