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The AI-ification of Google Search continues to accelerate: the company announced on Wednesday that it will start showing AI Overviews for even more kinds of queries, and that users around the world, even those who are logged out of Google, will start seeing them too.
There’s an even more ambitious AI search tool coming to Google, too. It’s called AI Mode, and it brings a search-centric chatbot right to the core Google experience. It is, more or less, Google’s take on Perplexity or ChatGPT Search. For now, AI Mode is just a test — it’s only available to users paying for Google One AI Premium, and even they will have to enable it in the Labs section of Search.
The idea behind AI Mode is that a lot of people searching Google would actually prefer to have their results be primarily AI-generated. If you switch to AI Mode (it’s a tab in the search page or the Google app, like Images or News) and enter a query, you’ll get back a generated answer, based on everything in Google’s search index, with a few supporting links interspersed throughout. The user experience feels a little like Gemini or any other chatbot, but you’re interacting with a Search-specific model, which means it’s more able to tap real-time data and interact directly with the web.
AI Mode is just the latest signal of just how important AI-generated content has become to Google Search, and how confident the company is becoming in what its models can deliver despite its well-documented issues with rock eating and glue pizza. “What we’re finding from people who are using AI Overviews is that they’re really bringing different kinds of questions to Google,” says Robby Stein, a VP of product on the Search team. “They’re more complex questions, that may have been a little bit harder before.” Google is bringing the Gemini 2.0 model to AI Overviews, and Stein says that will make Google more useful for questions about math, coding, and anything that requires more sophisticated reasoning.
As Google moves ever deeper into AI search, it seems to be running away from linking to websites — and the fundamental value trade it made with the internet. Stein is adamant that’s not the case. “We see that with AI Overviews, people will get the context, and they’ll click in. And when they click in and go to websites, they’ll stay longer on those websites. They’re probably better customers of those websites because they already have context coming in.” He says he hopes AI Overviews and AI Mode bring new people to Google for new things, rather than cannibalizing their existing behavior.
Stein says that AI Mode isn’t a Trojan horse for a complete search overhaul, because people use Google for too many things to replace it all with a chatbot. But there’s no denying that Google’s AI efforts are starting to completely surround, and quickly change, everything about what happens when you Google.
