It was inevitable, really, but now it's official: Google is testing a new all-AI web search mode that leaves users entirely beholden to what Gemini thinks they'll want.
The Chrome giant announced Wednesday a new experimental "AI Mode" that, in essence, is a supercharged version of the AI Overviews slapped on the top of nearly every search result page today. Unlike Overviews, however, AI Mode turns Google's web search engine into a customized Gemini 2.0-powered chatbot interface through which users can ask questions, get answers, and then ask follow ups to dive deeper into particular elements of a topic. The internet goliath's Gemini model generates its responses by collecting up and summarizing the results of multiple web searches based on the input queries, it would appear.
"This new search mode expands what AI Overviews can do with more advanced reasoning, thinking and multimodal capabilities so you can get help with even your toughest questions," Google's Robby Stein, VP of product for search, said of AI Mode.
"You can ask nuanced questions that might have previously taken multiple searches — like exploring a new concept or comparing detailed options — and get a helpful AI-powered response with links to learn more," Stein added, claiming this is something Google has heard that "power users" actually want.
You can ask nuanced questions that might have previously taken multiple searches
AI Mode is a small-scale opt-in Google Labs experiment, at least for now. AI Overviews, which Google also announced an expansion of yesterday, also started life as a Labs experiment, and now they're at the top of pretty much every Google search.
In other words, we may very well be looking at the future of Google Search: An AI-first experience that surfaces content not from across the web directly, but from whoever manages to best game the algorithm to get their content to the top of Gemini's interpretation of what matters.
Google declined to comment on whether AI-first-by-default search is its intended goal, though we're told by the cloud behemoth that Google users who rely on AI Overviews have been reporting more satisfaction with their results, natch, and tend to use Google Search more as a result. Young users have been particularly keen on AI Overviews, Google told us, which sounds a lot like a plan to front load more AI in search.
Google noted that, in cases where AI Mode doesn't have high confidence in the helpfulness and quality of its results, it will instead return a set of bog-standard web search results. As to whether traditional web results will always still generally show up in AI Mode, or be hidden entirely behind the AI Mode interface, Google avoided the question, saying its search offering sends visitors to billions of websites every day and it sees no reason to stop or hinder that.
As for quality, results from AI Mode are "rooted in our core quality and ranking systems," Stein noted. Systems that, we've noted before, have at times become markedly worse for some at returning valuable information in recent years.
Not only have some researchers confirmed fears that Google results (and those from other search engines) have been getting more crammed with SEO garbage and affiliate spam, but generative AI has been making the problem even worse, by flooding the web with computer-generate waffle and hallucinations.
Google's own much-pushed AI Overviews have been known to output junk, too, at times, thanks to folks gaming Google's algorithms and neural networks.
"AI Mode is rooted in our core search ranking and safety systems and anti-spam protections, which we have been refining for more than 20 years," Google noted in a more in-depth overview [PDF] of AI Mode than was included in its announcement.
"As with any early-stage AI product, we won't always get it right," Google added. "That's why we're starting out as an experiment available only as an opt-in through Labs, and people have to click to access the mode."
"Starting out as an experiment," mind you. In other words, expect AI Mode to become more prominent once the worst of the bugs get ironed out. ®